#cultural images

[luthienne]

anyway literally everyone is going through something all the time!!! everyone is wounded!!! everyone is human & no one makes it out of this life unscathed!! maybe try approaching people in good faith instead of always defaulting to the worst possible interpretations of each other

[devilsskettle]

Bride of Frankenstein (1935) / Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

Source: Curve; The Lesbian Magazine ( January 1997 Vol. 6)

[random-bookquotes]

After all, historical images have lives and histories that go beyond the context of their creation. While not everyone goes to Western art galleries, more or less everyone living in the developed world is caught in the unescapable capitalist slipstream of advertising and social media – where historical images of women contour and inform popular culture, from music videos, to advertising for formula milk, to album covers and fashion photography. Some media reference this legacy explicitly, from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s music video for ‘Apeshit’, shot in the Louvre; to Reebok ads ripping off Renaissance artist Botticelli to sell sportswear; to fashion and lifestyle shoots inspired by the horizontal or docile women in our art collections. Many more are influenced tacitly as our heritage of fine art and cultural images becomes part of our shared visual language. And, as we have seen in the National Gallery’s collection, many of these images objectify women, normalise violence against them, stereotype or exclude racial diversity, or demonise ageing and non-normative bodies and sexualities.

Catherine McCormack, Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies

[anistarrose]

Imagine, for a moment, that your internet just stopped loading images one day. Your dash might look pretty different (and less usable), but at least you can still make posts — whether about your internet situation, or about completely unrelated topics.

Then, imagine that one or more of your posts blew up, to the tune of hundreds if not thousands of notes. Imagine people started adding images to your posts.

Imagine your post circulating almost entirely in the form with four or five images attached, and with everyone in the notes laughing about those images — except you, who started the post in the first place, who can't even see those images because you're trapped in Tumblr's loading gradient hellscape.

You're excluded from any further conversations on your own post, because someone added a mystery image with the caption "don't leave this in the tags," but you have no idea which set of tags it is, and can't tell if it's one of the good takes from the tags or one of the horrible takes from the tags. You're excluded from the Tumblr users playing with JPEGs like dolls. You can try to guess the contents of the images based on people's reactions, but it's hard. And no one adding images even seems to notice the irony.

This is, of course, a real problem plaguing Tumblr users with regularly slow internet. And it's also a huge, insidious problem plaguing blind and low vision people who rely on either screen readers, or image descriptions in combination with enlarged text on their device.

People with disabilities around comprehending images, people who have images (or gifs) disabled due to photosensitivity, and many others are also affected.

If you add an image to a post without either alt text, an in-post image description, or even both for maximal inclusivity, you don't know if OP — or the person whose tags you're peer reviewing, or whose reply you're screenshotting — will actually be able to see it. From their perspective, you might just be shoving a mystery rectangle in their face, expecting them to be able to guess — or responding to them without them being able to know.

Imagine being on the receiving end of that expectation constantly. Imagine how isolating that must feel.

We need, collectively, to stop making assumptions that everyone we interact with online will be able to access, physically see, and mentally process images. The assumption that disabled people are vanishingly rare and statistically shouldn't really need to be considered is an assumption of structural and/or implicit ableism.

Write image descriptions. Write image descriptions for every image you post, if you're able — but if you have limited energy, or you're still learning, you should at least start trying your absolute best to describe images you add to other people's posts. If you're starting a conversation, even an online conversation, you should make your best effort to be accessible.

So: Write IDs, especially if they're as simple as just text, like screenshotted tags (link to guide). Write IDs even if you think the best ID you can write is too short, or too incomplete (link to post explaining why even "bad" IDs help).

Write IDs in general (link to a huge compilation of guides). Challenge ableist assumptions and inaccessibility.

[clockworkvampyre]

today i realized that the wrightworth molars picture turns a decade old

happy 10th anniversary to the best thing ever drawn

[bklily]

Replaying this event I noticed something and it was great.

Jamil's having a little crisis he'll get over it.

(background close-up under the cut so you can have your third eye opened)

[meticulouslymindlessart]

Thetis with the arms of Achilles

I saw several mosaics depicting this motive and decided to try my hand at it as well.

Also, I just find Thetis to be quite interesting as a character. There’s gotta be something fundamentally Tragic about raising a child, knowing that he will most likely die very young.

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(Close-Ups)

[queermasculine]

Maybe a stupid question but one I've asked myself, what's the difference in between a butch and a masc for you ? Is there one ?

not a stupid question! "butch" is an older word with more meanings across time. to straight people it's been a military style haircut, a male name (still a few old guys named butch in the US), and a fairly uncomplicated synonym for masculine. to lesbians, bisexuals and gay men, it's been all of the above, but it's also had a whole host of other connotations specific to us and our own ways of loving/performing masculinity. a lot of the different meanings of butch have faded or fallen out of fashion over the years, but the word has more or less kept its purpose among lesbians, giving it the lesbian tint it has today.

"masc" is a much newer term, and unlike butch, i don't believe it's ever been widely used by the straight mainstream. (not a lot of grandpas named masc out there.) it's my impression that masc first spread out from gay guys on grindr, or at least that played a big part in popularizing it, and it's been used pretty much exclusively in an lgbt context ever since. in that sense it's the word with the more explicitly queer origin, despite having a much shorter history. having risen to popularity in the age of social media, masc carries none of the historical baggage of butch, and as such it's a more open-ended term, implying very little about a person beyond their masculinity. you can see this difference exemplified in google search results: while looking up butch will primarily yield information about the word's significance to lesbians, masc will net you more neutral descriptions, like "a person whose gender identity is masculine, but who is not necessarily a man."

despite all that, masc and butch usually serve the same function (to express the masculinity of the subject) and are used pretty much interchangeably in many contexts. also worth noting is that the lesbian association of butch is not a rule, just an observation i've made about modern perceptions. bisexual women have always used butch (and femme) alongside lesbians, and to this day you'll still encounter gay men – usually older – who identify as butch. so in conclusion, if you're trying to pick what label to use for yourself, i wouldn't worry about it too much. both terms have room enough for you in them.

[sheltiechicago]

Shilatembo, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Traditional dancers perform as the remains of the slain Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba arrive in Shilatembo, where the leader was killed in 1961. The family of Lumumba buried his only known remains – a tooth – in the capital, Kinshasa, this week

Photograph: Guerchom Ndebo/AFP/Getty Images

[uncanny-tranny]

Whenever people who are entrenched in diet culture talk about how terrible chemicals are, I just want to whip out this:

[cryptickludovick]

Alaska moose, I think. By Brendon Gould.

[fairydrowning]

"Closeness lines over time" illustration by "Olivia de Recat"

[the-sappho-of-lesbos]

Source: Dyke London , by Rosa Ainley

[fox-guardian]

read a fic recently that had an interaction like

sasha: tim get like one social media PLEASE I am BEGGING

tim: I have linkedin?

and I cannot describe the Joy I felt reading that. they get it.

[thepeacefulgarden]