Holly Bush
Legs
Gone Fishing
Earlier in the week I went fishing. On OK Cupid. Now, I’ve generally had good experiences from that app and I’ve never really understood why people moan about it so much. I thought I’d struck lucky again with some good app-based chat with a man who I seemed to have a lot in common with, in and out of the bedroom. I gave him my number. Within 10 minutes of being in my WhatsApp he was suggesting I “get back into the habit of wearing stockings and heels because they slim the thighs and lengthen the legs.” When I called him on the inappropriateness of suggesting to a woman she wear something because of its slimming qualities he called me an “extremist feminist.” So I’ve thrown him back in the sea.
I continue to rock my tights and flats quite happily, smug in the knowledge he’ll never get to see how long and slim my legs are. It doesn’t mean I don’t agree with him about the aesthetic appeal of stockings though. If someone rocks the look I can’t deny they look hot as fuck!
Photo and post title by Livvy. Stockings rocked by Exhibit A.
Flotsam and Jetsam
Carved by time and tide,
Every pebble a sculpture,
Assuredly whole.
@19syllables
Missing Treasure
The wonderful thing about beaches is they accommodate so many interests. Whether you want to run, sleep, read, build sand castles, picnic or swim, there’s enough space and freedom to accommodate everyone.
Some people visit them to take nude photographs, others visit them to hunt for treasure. The thing is, some people are so absorbed in their own interest they miss the treasure right under their nose…
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
CW: Nan Goldin’s work deals with issues of domestic violence and drug addiction. The articles I link to in this post are really interesting reads but include references to and photographs of these things and also discuss the suicide of her sister.
My photo today bears so little resemblance to the inspiration shot that it’s not really possible to call it a true tribute. But the lives and locations of the people in Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are so removed from the lives of me and the people I photograph that I had to do more of an interpretation today.
Shot between 1979 and 1986, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was first shown in 1985 as a 45 minute 700 image slide show set to music and then published as a book in 1986. These are not easy photos to look at. In fact you frequently have to turn away. She photographs her and her friends fucking in squalid settings, shooting up heroin, fighting. She captures herself as a victim of domestic violence in a self portrait called ‘Nan One Month After Being Battered’. Her friend who died of AIDS is photographed in an open coffin.
In this review in the New York Times says: “Her “Ballad” is open to charges of narcissism, exhibitionism, voyeurism and the glamorization of bad behavior, qualities that are partly what make it so riveting.”
The first photographer to shoot in the casual confessional diaristic style that we see now at every turn, Sean O’Hagan said in The Guardian: “We are now living to a degree in a world that Nan Goldin created long before the digital camera and Instagram made it ubiquitous: a self-absorbed, often revelatory world where the everyday and the exotic exist in uneasy cohabitation.”
The New York Times and Guardian links above are both interesting reads, but if you’ve got the appetite for more, Dazed magazine has an A-Z of Nan Goldin.
Red Rope
Rust Bucket
Photo by the beautiful Tabitha Rayne. Post title by the almost as beautiful and always rude Exhibit A. Legs the model’s own!
Window Dressing
Double Exposure (reprise)
Modesty said in her comment on the original a couple of weeks back that she’d kept scrolling for the opposite view. Well scroll no more…
Double Exposure
exposing40 