Jezebel 
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New York, 1:59 AM
Sun Nov 8
20 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/14/09
10/14/09
10/15/09
10/14/09
And Mr. Don Lemon...you don't know whether or not you're offended?? Give me a freaking break. You're on CNN and interested in keeping your paycheck. Please don't present your watered down quasi-opinions as if they are actually you're own or indicative of how you truly feel. Puh-lease.
10/14/09
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10/14/09
The thing that is still bothering me about this specific incident is that the concept could have been well executed. There could have been black models in white paint, a mix of models in a mix of skin tones (divided down the middle, splitting the body in half stylistically or whatever artsy mumbo jumbo you'd like to do). That I could actually see as working toward some sort of artistic statement on skintone or just simply a well-thought out play between the concepts of light and dark by a variety of model types.
Unfortunately, I think they managed to do the opposite.
10/14/09
Models can talk??!?
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10/13/09
I also found the layers of paint (and cracking paint) and the recurrent masking to be making a more complex statement about race and identity than a "blackface" argument allows. I was struck dumb by the amount of comments downthread suggesting that this sort of a statement would be more explicit had a black model been painted white, as I would have found that at least as offensive as many have found this ("we have to hire a token black girl? oh. can we make her a white girl?").
On the other hand, it's a loaded gesture that an American photographer should have been more sensitive about. Hell, nationality doesn't really let the French off the hook. I'm Australian, and let me tell you, most people I know were appalled by the Hey Hey segment. Blackface isn't entirely unique to the US, something Bindi Cole explored in her recent work 'Not Really Aboriginal' (link at bottom).
I think, for me, it comes down to avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to allusions to race or racism as BEING racist. I don't think Cole's work is racist, despite riffing off blackface, and as racism is a grave accusation, I'm not entirely ready to dismiss what could be an interesting experiment on French Vogue's behalf out of hand. But of course, I might be being entirely too generous to a publication that didn't even allow Lara Stone pants.
ETA: apologies for my seeming inability to embed or activate links.
[[www.ccp.org.au/docs/catalogues/BindiCole.pdf]]
10/12/09
Harry Connick Jr. give this spread a 0.
10/12/09
I don't mean for a second that the two are analogous. But surely we do eventually hope to get to a point where, just as a photographer might put a blond wig on a brunette model, or dress a boy as a girl, or vice versa, or whatever - we can see skin colour just as another difference to play with in the way we play with others? That would be the ideal of a post-racial world... but I'm not sure that we're anything like being there yet, and so I'm decidedly unsure what I make of this shoot.