#5
'Either you ask politely, or you get good photographs'
First off, apologies for the radio silence the last month - life gets in the way. This overdue visual mixtape is the usual imagery that’s resonated and also a fair bit of writing, a result of the two books I’ve read this week (Utopia Avenue and Milk Fed) that have left me ruminating on both art and my body. So forgive the longer text in this, I hope some of you will understand what I’m trying to say with it.
“Songs do not change the world. People do. People pass laws, riot, hear God and act accordingly. People invent, kill, make babies, start wars. Which begs a question. “Who or what influences the minds of the people who change the world?” My answer is “Ideas and feelings”… where do ideas and feelings originate?… Others. One’s heart and minds. The press. The arts. Stories. Last, but not least, songs. Songs, like dandelion seeds, billowing across space and time. Who knows where they’ll land?… It’s the Parable of the Sower. Often, usually, they land on barren soil and don’t take root. But sometimes, they land in a mind that is ready. Is fertile. What happens then? Feeling and ideas happen. Joy, solace, sympathy. Assurance. Cathartic sorrow. The idea that life could be, should be, better than this. An invitation to slip into somebody else’s skin for a little while. If a song plants and idea or feeling in a mind, it has already changed the world.”
— from Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell
I’ve been reading a lot for work, though still making very little art. I do feel like I am returning to a former artistic self in some way, as if whatever is inside of me that must compulsively create is getting louder and louder, and most likely won’t stop until I heed its screams and just do something. The more I immerse myself in other art, the more inspired I feel and the more I remember why art is so important to me in the first place.
Art has always been what I’ve used to interpret the world, as cliché as it sounds - I never knew how to deal with my feelings so turned to music and imagery to portray them instead (even if it was only in the form of a tumblr blog at 13). Music was always the voice, what I wished I could express myself, or how freeing I felt immense guitar solos sounded. I love guitar when it’s almost apocalyptic, those all consuming dark riffs that I longed to be able to create as I imagined that was one of the purest outlets for inner chaos. (Utopia Avenue was a great read for this, it’s a novel on a fictional band set in the late 1960s and had some interesting prose on art and ideas, like the quote above). Photos that resonated were more to do with how I wished my life looked, an ideal of sorts. Which then makes sense when looking at my earlier work, how a lot of that was photographing conventional beauty, almost to disguise how far away from that I felt inside.
In ways I used tumblr to pave over how I truly was, leaving only what I wanted people to associate with me, no matter how distant that was to my real life. I think my height of tumblr usage was between fourteen to sixteen, also the height of my body image battles, (I hadn’t been introduced to any fat positive media then - bar Beth Ditto and Hairspray) and I remember always thinking about how much I loved so easily being able to curate everything to appear exactly how I wanted it; changing the themes, the usernames, the icons, and almost aching with how I wished it could be the same for my own body.
Being perceived is a part of being alive, it is unavoidable. Yet online, the control is in our hands for the most part, that is what lured me in first and still has teeth sunk into me today. Melissa Broder’s writing has always oozed with this notion and Milk Fed, her latest novel has echoes of it too. Reading Milk Fed has left me thinking a lot about my body, mostly because the novel revolves around food, self perception and desire. Don’t get me wrong, I love her writing and enjoyed this book too, however as someone who has faced fatphobia for an entire lifetime, it did make me roll my eyes and also felt a little fetishising of fat bodies in parts.
I’m a lot more comfortable in my body now than when I was a teenager, however I still despise the fact that other people will look at my body any time I want to exist somewhere other than my home. My body is just that - mine, and at 25 it is becoming tiring witnessing others gawk at it like it’s theirs, or that they have right to speak on it. Just last week, on my way to Tesco, a child playing in the street called me a ‘fat c**t’. The rest of the walk, I toyed with the idea of how having a body that seems to elicit such a response is actually quite liberating. All I had to do was walk to get spoken to that way, an innocent action, yet there are thousands of worse things I could do to deserve a response like that - however in a fat body, even just existing is apparently the worst thing I’m able to do, so why shouldn’t I go all out and start causing chaos anyway? Why bother trying to lead a good life and be a good person when I have a ‘bad’ body and that’s all anyone will ever really focus on? It just got me thinking on my body in a way I hadn’t for quite some time.
Anyway, all of this rambling is a tangent from the books above, both of which I did enjoy and recommend. I’ll end this on another quote from Utopia Avenue that I really love as a photographer. After taking a photo of the band without warning and getting questioned, the character says “either you ask politely, or you get good photographs”…
More recent reads, both 5 stars!
Five film stills -
Thank you for subscribing to the visual mixtapes. Reach out to me via DM at @eolhcsheppard if you’ve any comments on this week’s, I’d love to know any of your opinions on it (good or bad!).
Until next week,
x Chloe