even*cleveland: 'it's always the man looking through the lens'

'it's always the man looking through the lens'

“You know what?” she says. “I’m not that into images. This is like a major problem for me, lifelong. But I’m really good at admitting it now. I just don’t care that much about fashion photography.” One reason is content. “All the images are from a male point of view, all of it, my whole life, all of our lives — it’s always the man looking through the lens. Imagine if it were more women? … We’re missing out on things. And we’re conditioned to be ashamed of menopause and aging. I’m just not doing it. I’m into embracing menopause — I’m not there yet, but Frances McDormand style.”

Rachel Comey, quoted in "Rachel Comey Makes Herself Comfortable," by Cathy Horyn for The Cut, 9/5/2018. It's a great read.

I remember the first time I saw a pair of Rachel Comey shoes back in 2008, and it's a terrible 21st-century cliché to say this, but I felt seen. It was the first fashion thing I ever experienced where I felt like someone out there was making something for the person I am, not some version of the woman someone else expects me to be.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

'it's always the man looking through the lens'

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