Normal (Patreon)

Following yesterday's post, about a year later, I had arranged with 18 models to meet me at Arsenic in LA, 14 arrived, and we had a blast (the remaining got paid shoot that they had to prioritize or delayed flights).

Here is one of the more controversial shoots:
I think all women are beautiful, and I wanted to show that, so I set up to make a “gradation” of skin tones after sorting people by height. That was what worked best graphically.

But oh-dear, the woke community took offense, over sorting people according to skin tone. They also took offense to an uneven distribution of women of color or any image I did that could be interpreted to have white women in a “superior” position.

I’m still unsure what to think about this: imagine that you have two women, a dark-skinned and a caucasian. Now suppose I put a collar and a leash on the white woman, and the black is holding the leash; that's cool, liberating, and empowering. If I switch the roles and make precisely the same image where the black woman is on a leach, I’m a misogynist racist playing into the oppressing society of whites against black.

For some people, everything is about race; for me, a woman is a woman regardless of skin color, and if anything, I appreciate dark skin more than white skin as it's possible to do more cool stuff with dark skin.

But how do we bridge that gap and have a picture be a picture regardless of what ethnicity, or is that impossible?