Photographic fun

[urocyon]

I set up a Fotki account for hair photos, as much for my own reference as anything else. :) I also got vatine to take some yesterday evening, which I put into an album.

The hair seems to be responding well to a lot more conditioning. I'll be interested to see how the curl pattern develops as (a) it gets longer, and (b) I continue not abusing it! It was tighter as it got longer before. (Then I tried to comb it all out. :-| )

BTW, that Bozo orange effect from the evening sunlight hitting it does look like what happens when it gets sunbleached (or, gods forbid, I try 20-volume peroxide on it). I used to get exactly that color every summer, especially from spending a lot of time in a chlorinated outdoor pool. Urgh. I was briefly worried that I inexplicably had splotches like that in my hair again, until I figured out it was from the lighting.

Most of the ones from the front did, indeed, turn out not quite in focus. That was not the only reason I did not include the few that were, however. Even knowing where it's coming from, I recoiled in horror from all of them. It took some courage to ask Ingvar to drag the camera out at all!

At the same time, I got very frustrated at the huge ball of internalized racism and fat acceptance* fail. It still frustrates me today. I did a post on this kind of thing last year: I used to feel very ugly indeed. It's not like I wasn't aware of what was going on well before that. Actually, in this context, a pair of the badly-GIMPed up pics from that post illustrate the point pretty well:






That's just the way my head, neck, and shoulders are made, which is not uncommon among people of my ethnic background. It still makes me cringe to look at my jawline in a lot of photos. Old training dies hard. And that's before we get to the "squashed", "fleshy-tipped" nose, "squinchy" eyes, and "chubby" (broad) face. :/ The kinds of insults I've heard have not been exactly subtle, but I sure have managed to internalize them anyway.

I am still impressed by the similarities between photographic portraiture that really makes me cringe and some really (sometimes purposely) unflattering historical ones:


1830s lithograph after 1806 Ames portrait of Thayendanegea/"Joseph Brant", from Wikimedia Commons. Gotta love the overstuffed rag doll look, too. The original Ames portrait is the one I pasted on my stepdad's shoulders, above. I also can't help but notice how, in line with stereotypes, by 1830 he's depicted as much darker-complected than in the earlier life portraits. (Charles Willson Peale's one from 1797, in particular, though it otherwise looks like Peale was trying to paint an alien life form.)

I also got irked at continuing to go for the "perpetually surprised", brows raised, expression in order to look like my eyes are open in photos. (I used to run around like that a lot of the time, and got headaches from it!)

As I recall thewronghands observing several years back about some of her own photos, flinching my whole head back from the camera does not help. At all. As epitomized by this one:



Yeah, the anxious expressions like I was expecting the camera to explode in my face did not help me enjoy looking at those photos. The ones in profile made me uncomfortable, but not nearly as much as the full frontal ones in which I was flinching. Seeing those expressions I didn't even know I was making at the time disturbed me perhaps more than anything else. Obviously, some more work is needed on this stuff.
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* I am actually verging on too thin to be healthy ATM, from the diabetes, but still automatically perceive some of my features as "fat"--and reacted very negatively to that. It's not really a "double chin", and so what if it were?! Grrr.

Comments

[polemista]

Woot! Your hair looks really nice! :D
That older post of yours is sad, but really fascinating.
Gah, AWAY with internalized crap, you and your mum are both so lovely looking!

It's not really a "double chin", and so what if it were?!
Exactly!

[urocyon]

Thanks. :) That was the first day in a while that I thought it looked pretty good! The conditioner only thing has been working out well so far. I noticed yesterday that it was time for a wash, because it was starting to get dry and frizzing out--not what I would have expected before, at all.

It's gotten a lot better, but I'm still touchier than I'd like to be. Part of that, no doubt, came from nasty kids pointing to what they could easily spot as "strange" (easier to point out someone's nose than behavior patterns which struck them as weird), and a lot of it is from growing up in a strange environment (as I mentioned in LJ comments). One thing I forgot to throw in there is that I can well imagine, for some people, that if their academic careers have taken them to a third-rate university in what they consider the arse end of nowhere--maybe because they're unpleasant hacks in the first place--it's probably really handy if there's some ready group of people they can take out some of their frustrations on. Depressingly understandable, but that doesn't make it right. Recognizing what might be behind some of it makes it easier not to take things so personally, though!

[singingnettle.livejournal.com]

But...but...you have beautiful features and skin. I would never look at you and say, "Ugh!"

That, I know, has no bearing on our internalized perceptions of ourselves.

Then again, I also have "squinty" eyes (to quote my birth mother, who is very disturbed by them) and The Jowls of Doom even when I'm a size 4, and the naturally bushy eyebrows to boot...so...I wouldn't be likely to find those horrifying on anyone else. I've spent some time learning not to hate them on myself.

As far as I know, my background is pure Russian on my mother's side, but we're a little sketchy on my father, whom at various times my mother has told me was English, Irish, or Scottish and has referred vaguely to "having something squinty around his father's eyes," so who the heck knows where the phenotype comes from. We cover it by referring to the probably of Mongolians at the Russian border. But two families who've both been in what is now the US for 300 years are bound to have mixed it up somewhere, no matter how stiffly they argue the "purity" of their lineage. (Which is why my distinctly gold-toned skin and tilted eyes bother them so much.)

Racism. I understand, I think, where it comes from in an evolutionary sense, but what an idiotic thing for us to still be dragging around.

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I wasn't trying to fish, though now it looks like one possible interpretation. :)

That's one of the annoying things: I don't find those features disturbing on other people. And I thought I was doing better with not hating them on myself, and not continuing to let some nasty people camp out for free in my mind. Ah well...

Racism. I understand, I think, where it comes from in an evolutionary sense, but what an idiotic thing for us to still be dragging around.

*nods vigorously*

[singingnettle.livejournal.com]

No, I didn't think you were fishing. It was just an offer of my opinion.

It's funny that we dislike in ourselves things we ignore, tolerate, or even like in others. Humans are weird.

[rootedinsong.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, the fat face and double chin thing... Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to not automatically see those characteristics as ugly.

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

A little too familiar, eh? :( That's been the hardest thing for me to consider OK on myself. Well, the "fat" thing in general.

[rootedinsong.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't commenting on your pictures - I can't see them on my phone - but just on that reaction. I see myself as ugly much, much more than I see others as ugly. Although I have never perceived my relatives of Native ancestry as particularly attractive...

[urocyon-c.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of the whole "fat face and double chin thing" as sounding like you were too familiar with it. :)

Yeah, I know what you mean. One of the things that really got me thinking about some of this crap? Running across a photo of (burly) Gary Farmer yukking it up with Graham Greene, and having an obviously disproportionate reaction which took me completely by surprise. I was automatically cringing, they reminded me so much of some of my own big, loud relatives I was supposed to find embarrassing. They looked like my mom's cousins, with their big embarrassing laughs. (And no wonder with the familiar dynamic, since it turns out those two are cousins.) It also hit me that my relatives were supposed to be particularly embarrassing when they were obviously having a good time and not caring what other people thought! Not exactly subtle, but hey.

I mean, it was absolutely ridiculous. I didn't realize just how much very specific lurking shame I had going until that little demonstration. I knew there was some, but not to what extent.

There is a reason for some of the intensity there: I grew up in a college town with some really hostile attitudes toward local people, a lot of whom just happened to be Native. You can't be racist if you insist they're all "just" stupid white trash--which sounds bad enough to me, especially when said white trash are obviously of a different ethnic background and easily identified as such on sight--and must be lying if they say otherwise. It was not a good place to grow up with certain physical or cultural characteristics. I ran into a lot of "not racist, really!" harassment in school, as part of the local minority in that system--and my family got ridiculed a lot, including by teachers. All the administrators were non-local. Most local people were less stubborn and had moved into one of the surrounding counties by then; even more have in the past 15 years. That town is a weird island. So I am maybe a little touchy about the "you can't possibly be who you say you are" factor, too.

OK, that turned out way longer than intended!