http://www.angelfebrero.blogspot.com

http://www.paludario.com

In the Metro section of the Chicago Tribune there is an article that shows the Field Museum’s curator of mammals, Larry Heaney, standing next to a model?? or an actual taxidermy of a Tamaraw – a near identicle species from the same area that is endangered.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0610170063oct17,1,4804550.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

MY NEXT PROJECT! no fashion though. these ones are for art making.

If you or anyoneis interested in keeping up with more of my work I do have an exhibition coming up with a wonderful artist named Wafaa Bilal. Bilal is an Iraqi born artist who was airlifted from a refgee camp in Iraq soon after the Gulf War. He has much insight to the human condition – the title of his recent book of conceptual photography.

He is my mentor and a past instructor of mine from college.

We show in Dallas this December at a gallery called Pawn. His work certainly is culturally important and worth the attention of anthropologists!
http://www.crudeoils.us/wafaa/html/midwestOlympia.html

I personally adore diorama — who hasn’t worshipped in that temple of the enlightenment, the American Museum of Natural History? Critique all you want, but these places usually fill me with a sense of wonder.

Thanks again for your work, CTaylor. Please keep us posted.

But now I gotta go!

also oneman – i am not detached, i do not feel that the photos are above a greater definition, but i am only one person who can create only so much and if i had the means to make something that pleased the entire world – well honestly i probably would resist that because that would make it really watered down. i cannot be responsible for how every person, from any walk of life, interprets my work… that would make it impossible to make anything. it would eat me up and i would never make anything at all. let along anything of value that inspired people to think.

if all pictures are made to address nothing, that is a great diservice. dumbed down is a great diservice.

dont you think?

if every photograph is made to please the entire community then it is looked at and forgotten. you can see that type of picture out there by the millions in this culture daily. they hold no significant meaning – other than perhaps on the whole as a part of an era in imagery that is intentionally empty, so that is does not provoke thought. people who talk to one another about ideas are dangerous. scientists and artists are not unlike at all. to suggest that an artist is any more detached than others in different fields, as though some sientists or some anthropologists are not – wow that just blows me away.

its a stereotype that is incredibly outdated.

also is not the exotic and the native only exotic and a native to people such as yourself? people who study them?

are they exotic or native within their own cultures? are we not exotic and native to them? – or were we?

it seems to me that those again are terms used by white men who are looking in from the outside, not from the actual people you refer to as exotic or native.

the model is American, her parents are born here, her grandparents are born here, and her great-grandparents became citizen here… before my own ancestors i might add (and visually i seem white).

in this day and age is it not futile to try and label non-white people as native or white or anything of that kind? we live in the great melting pot.

the native of the past were indeed treated poorly, and still are. i do not think these photos suggest either or. that would make it a different project – made for the gallery, not the pages of a lifestyle publication.

we can make up all kinds of things – and argue – but the reality is this project is for a lifestyle publication, it is not for an anthropologist monthly. that does not make me detached… that makes my life slightly more manageable:)

critique is important.

if the model were blonde and with blue eyes would you respond the same way? do Asian people feel it is negative? how about other cultures? so much of this does sound like upper class educated white men. (which is great – and perhaps that is totally wrong)

btw – regarding American point of view… perhaps but my friend, a nature/wildlife photographer famed for theorizing builidng natural bridges between parks so that animals can migrate in the U.S. – he is from Germany. he loves it. he fights for animal rights and he is so happy to see something in popular culture showing animals. he feels it is positive to see a model with the animals. he views them as though they are all alive.

just another side to it all.

so – what if that blonde haired blue eyed model is from the Middle East or some other unsuspecting area for blondes – where they do exist and also where historically the people have been labeled negatively as exotic.

your thoughts?

also they way you write is as though the model is being degraded by being considered an animal. that is if you truly believe that animals are inferior to humans – which i do not. i feel they are often superior and always equal. in the photos she is equal to them, she does not fight them, control them nor fear them. this is important to looking at humans relationship with other living creatures.

sorry – the way you wrote about the Bongo was like you did not know it was the animal (i had forgotten the possibility of your area of expertise).

oh – her poses are actually done to show the dress, and also combine contemporary performance and dance.

still – definitions and meanings of words do change over time.

check out this artist – really amazing – Anthony Goicolea
http://www.anthonygoicolea.com/

Do understand, I’m not trying to be critical, though clearly critique-al. Images (and any artwork) have a life independent of their authors’ intentions, so I don’t want to come off as accusing Taylor of anything.

I do have a bone to pick with something she says above, though: “for the most part in contemporary cultures of YoCo (Young Cosmopolitans) we choose to not be victimized by such things, nor try to take responsibilty for the few out there whom are.” YoCo! Who knew? I guess that makes me “OlCo”… Anyway, while the whole “I refuse to be victimized” thing is pretty much in keeping with Western ideals of the self as individual, particularly for Americans, I have to say, there’s not always much of a choice. The native peoples represented in natural history museums didn’t “choose” to be victimized either — which doesn’t return, say, the sacred bundles of the Meskwaki Indians to them. (Held by European museums, they aren’t covered by NAGPRA; for that matter, even a lot of US museums aren’t covered by NAGPRA.) And choosing not to be responsible for those who are victimized also doesn’t necessarily mean one *isn’t* responsible — that, too, is not usually a choice we can make.

Again, by saying this, I’m not trying to imply that Taylor’s images necessarily victimize anyone, and I’m certainly not drawing on the types of arguments anti-porn activists use to impose their own kind of controls on sexuality. My only goal here is to a) analyze my own discomfort with these images, and b) say something meaningful about the culture in which Taylor, her models, the museum, and us the viewers are embedded. Certainly we can interrogate the notions of “beauty” at work in images like this without a) accepting the idea of the artist as detached and independent from cultural reality or b) accepting as the only alternative the condemnation of such works and their creators?

i did not earase any signs of being real from this model.

main thing you all do need to know is that the model is barely touched up – no one would see a difference. that means i took out literally one or two TINY bumps. i didnt even need to do that as it would never have shown in print because they were too small. her skin is indeed near poreless and from the distance i am shooting her – she seems poreless.

she may look like a mannequin to you – but she has perfect skin. she is of that extreme beauty that high fashion celebrates. she stands for the unattainable.

i do not think she feels she looks like a mannequin.

i do touch up some models, but this one – she is really like this. it amazed me.

she is also not underweight and in fact is a very, very normal weight for a young woman. she has more weight than a mannequin portrays.

love your insight on the colonization oneman… SO TRUE. they are records of their spreading the white ideals.

terms such as exoticized and trophy are purely male terms, or terms that suggest she is a victim, which she is not. you are only a trophy is you are on a mans arm… which she is not.

she is not shown in compromising positions, as with Playboy.

also a Bongo, is a real animal, not a term. it is a real name of an animal that is still living on this planet. i may desscrbe it as exotic. is that accurate?

back to exotic. i personally feel that definition cannot be associated with non-white anymore, and that is an outdated way to read into the word. – perhaps the linguist here may have some insight to that… but its meaning will change person to person, culture to culture, profession to profession, and male to female.

exotic has in my entire lifetime been a good thing… while when used to talk about saaaaaay The history of the African American in cinema – it does indeed change.

if you look at the how exotic was used in the 1920’s description of native peoples by anthropologists – sure – it was a bad thing, but this is not the 1920’s anymore, nor is this anthropology.

the model is represented well.

fashion and modeling is not a female thing. it is a male and female thing. is there sexism in the industry – yes. is there racism in the insdustry – perhaps. it is not balck and white. for the most part in contemporary cultures of YoCo (Young Cosmopolitans) we choose to not be victimized by such things, nor try to take responsibilty for the few out there whom are.

showing women and men as sexual, or as in my case as sexy – is not sexism. we should not deny sexuality. women are sexual. men are sexual. it is how you the viewer chooses to read into sexy, that sexism gets involved. of course i am not addressing pornography – which i am not qualified to talk about on a professional level.

pornography, i will say, is not what it used to be in the YoCo. MANY women are pornogrpahers. so like it or not – the female image and the feminist is different now.

beauty is special. good or bad it is fruitless to contest, it is desirable by most everyone in some form. a beautiful mind perhaps, if not body. it is stunning when you see a women such as that model in real life. they are different.

if a fashion spread provokes actual conversation, it is a success. to make any image that inspires people to think, or in this case rethink certain cultural issues, it is a wonderful thing.

i must say my office is quite pleased that some people who (i am assuming) do not normally pay too much attention to fashion spreads – are in fact doing just that. it is even more ideal to me, that those people are intellectuals such as yourselves. note the comment by REX about the ampire waist on the dress.

Yet the photos make me feel uncomfortable, for a couple of reasons. I should note, that’s not necessarily a Bad Thing, to be made to feel uncomfortable, but neither is it necessarily a Good Thing. The first is the issue I have raised here before, the “waxworkification” effect that happens when living people are exhibited in the museum. In most of these images, the model herself looks as dead and inert as the taxiderms she is posed among — the first image I saw from the series (at BoingBoing I think) was the woman among the bamboo, called “Bongo in the bamboo forest” on MKEonline (Bongo?!), and I was convinced it was a mannequin! Part of this is the photoshoppery — glamour photoshopping already tends to erase the signs of life from models’ bodies, and in these photos the compositing of the models into photos of the diorama means that differences in lighting also necessarily make the model seem detached from her surroundings (which, of course, she is). But part of it is the museum context itself, the placing on display of the human form and the implicit connection that creates to both a) dead things, and b) animals.

The association with animals leads me to the second source of my discomfort, which is related to the discomfort Kerim originally expressed in relation to the display of natives in natural history museums. If displaying Ota Benga in the zoo or displaying dioramas of Maasai warriors demonstrate the low regard that native peoples have been held in by their Western conquerors (equating them with both animals and tokens of conquest), then what does displaying women in the same context say about the status of women? Especially in a field like fashion photography, which is already overdetermined by the commodification of images of women as objects of consumption? It’s no great secret, I think, that the equation of women with animals relates to their role as sex objects (Playboy Bunnies come immediately to mind), and I can’t help but see the placement of models in animal dioramas along these lines. Consider, for example, the young woman photoshopped into the place formerly occupied by the happy otter, whose pose even mimics that of the otter she replaces.

The association with conquest is a corollary to this concern. As Taylor herself (himself? I’m assuming the photographer is female, only because Kerim has used “her” a couple of times and there’s been no protest from the photographer) noted, natural history museums in the West were founded as repositories for the symbols of conquest — the Victorian hinter, again, bringing back the trophies of his trek to the heart of darkest Africa, or young anthropologist FH Cushing sending Zuni pots, fetishes, and other objects back to the Smithsonian. The big museums read as records of colonization, and in fact were self-consciously constructed to do so. And so, again, I wonder at the meanings encoded by images of women alongside the other trophies of colonization.

It is in this connection, I think, that the “exoticness” of the model comes into play. I don’t doubt that Taylor seeks out models that, for whatever reason, strike her as particularly attention-worthy, and on the face of it it’s hard to find fault with that. Yet I also wonder about the unexamined assumptions coded into that decision-making process, and can’t help but think that in a society where “white” is coded as the standard, “exoticness” is necessarily “non-white” — and that the markers of difference that make one “exotic” are equally necessarily markers of the colonial conquest referenced by the existence of these dioramas and therefore by these images.

I’ll admit, I’m conflicted, with the same kind of ambivalence that I felt about the display of “Dangers of the Mail”. I don’t see how you can reference the natural history museum without referencing this past, nor do I think you should — I think that this past is a necessary part of the museum itself,just as the past of anti-Indian prejudice is a necessary part of America’s history. But I don’t think we should be comfortable with that past, either — which is what I think Kerim was originally saying about these images, though I get the impression that the “ironic commentary” Kerim sought in them was not the intention of the photographer.

As to whether early anthropology did any good …. On the one hand the anthropologists were eager to show that these people had culture and weren\’t just \”savages\” as many then thought. On the other hand, they seemed to place them just one step up the evolutionary ladder from the animals downstairs, and portrayed them as a vanishing race, thus making it easier to forget those who were still alive. And of course, there were fights among the anthropologists over how these displays should be presented. Oneman\’s earlier post on Boas talks about some of this.

i think zoologists made the dioramas too. they were really bizarre people back then.

but has their work, as disturbing as is was, done any good?

c