At 9:47 PM -0400 5/9/10, R. E. Baker wrote:
They were generally cute but suggestive. As I have stated many times before. I don't shoot landscapes, or seascapes or rocks and trees or products or anything that doesn't involve people. I am very commercial. I shoot photos that make people look pretty (or handsome as the case may be)
But times have changed, Russ. And what was cute or handsome in the '50s was offensive to many then and has become much more so since then.
"Very commercial" is just as much a social error now as it was then. Think of the consequences of "the Marlborough Man", the car repair shop pin-up calendar, the Norman Rockwell style - all icons of the '40s and '50s - an age when cigarette makers still had the gall to insist that there was no harm in smoking, that women who wished to do something besides be cute and have babies simply couldn't unless they were gay and then had to pretend they had spouses and dealt continuously with being put down, where babies were something men didn't bother to change the diapers of.
I don't think it's such a bad idea to remind women of what an insulting age the post-war/pre-Kennedy era was. So many of them weren't alive then to be subjected to the bullsh*t assumptions of that era.
But I, too, who grew up in that era and fights still every day with being subjected to the assumptions of it, do not find this sort of stuff worthy of the time expended.
-- Emily L. Ferguson mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 508-563-6822 New England landscapes, wooden boats and races http://www.landsedgephoto.com http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/
