Barbies, Broncos, and Barrels

I have been super-inspired by Barbie lately.

Maybe it’s the impending feature film, or my mother going on Poshmark shopping sprees for Barbie clothes and sharing her finds with me (yes, apparently you can buy Barbie clothes on Poshmark). Whatever it it, I have ideas. In my last post, I used Barbie to explore the relationship between her plastic body and our fleshy human ones, and I like the idea of combining the doll with actual people in future shoots. However, most of my ideas center Barbie as the focus, using a macro lens and carefully chosen locations to imagine what her life could look like.

I photograph a lot of rodeos, so when my mother found a Winking Western Barbie and Ken online, I knew I had to attempt a Barbie rodeo. (I did wind up putting the cowgirl attire on a different Barbie, because the Winking Barbie’s face was damaged). Any new concept takes a few tries to work the kinks out—this may be Barbie’s first rodeo, but I don’t think it’ll be her last. While a thrifted plastic horse came in handy to transform Barbie into a barrel racer, it was the sideline romance of two other characters that became the main story for me. My friend Steven shook his head at me when he found out I used a roll of Lomochrome Purple for this shoot, a specialty film made by Lomography with purple color shifts, but the roll was given to me by another friend who wasn’t entirely sure if she’d shot anything on it, so I didn’t want to save it for anything too precious.

Turns out she had shot it, but just didn’t fully rewind the lead. In some of the below images, you’ll see double exposures that literally add another layer to this already otherworldly western moment.

Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.

Life in Plastic

I grew up obsessed with Barbie.

She was my favorite toy, and my earliest avenue to imaginary play and fashion. My mother loves Barbie too, and spent hours with me pairing outfits. When we couldn’t afford a real Barbie house, my mother charmed carpet samples off the salesmen at the flooring store across the street, and laid them on the floor in the corner of my bedroom, each colored square representing a different “room” in Barbie’s house. She hung vintage scarves low on the walls to represent Barbie’s posh wallpaper.

My mother never outgrew Barbie, and neither did I. We both still have impressive collections, mostly cobbled together from thrift stores. The majority of mine are unboxed and piled in a basket in my living room; the shelves in my mother’s house are lined with collectible Barbies still pristine in their packaging and interspersed with thrifted dolls dressed in crocheted outfits she finds on Poshmark. Thirty years later, we still sit together on her couch and dig through piles of Barbie clothes.

The Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, opens in less than two months (the weekend of my birthday!), and the plastic princess has been heavy in media lately. I had the idea for the below photoshoot when thinking about Barbie’s hard plastic smallness in comparison to my body’s soft muchness. A lot has been made of Barbie’s impact on girls’ body image; her proportions have been proved to be nearly impossible for an actual human body to function. The flowing blonde hair, the miniscule waist, the blue doe eyes, all pose a risk to a young person’s developing self-esteem.

But as a child of Barbie, I never thought of her as someone I needed to emulate. She was a vehicle for fun clothing and imaginative adult scenarios I wanted to play-act. It never crossed my mind that I needed to look like Barbie; I simply wanted to use her bendy little body to live out adult life as I saw it in my young mind. I appreciate the more inclusive versions of Barbie that have hit shelves in recent years, but growing up in the eighties, I understood Barbie could be her version of beautiful, and I could be mine.

Which I also credit to my mother, who is brunette and curvy and proud. My mother teaching me that we were beautiful no matter what anyone else looked like, fictious or not, had far more impact on my self-image than the impossible proportions of a doll. I have more ideas for Barbie photoshoots to come this summer, and although I initially was not sure how this one would pan out, I am beyond pleased with the results. It captures everything I had in my heart when I set out to make it, the juxtaposition of Barbie’s femininity versus a real woman’s, and the beauty of both.

As always, comments and thoughts are welcome. Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

She's in Bloom

Hello!

I haven’t blogged in a couple weeks—I’ve been mostly posting one-offs to Instagram and sitting on a few rolls a film that have actual blog-worthy collections on them, one series in particular that I have been very much looking forward to seeing.

A few weeks ago, I took a walk through my city and shot an entire roll of closeup flowers. I rewound that roll, reloaded it (trying my best to wind to to the same start point without any markers), and then shot a roll of self-portraits in the park. The portraits themselves were a bit of an ordeal; my air cable release wasn’t firing reliably, and the needle inside it that pushes the shutter button wasn’t retracting after being fired, so when I advanced the film, it would immediately fire again. After each shot, I had to disconnect the cable release, manually push the needle back in, and reattach to my camera. When I first I arrived at the park, the cable release wasn’t firing at all, and I almost packed up and went home.

Glad I didn’t.

The below images are my first attempt at intentional double exposures (we’ve had a few happy accidents like the ones posted here). My friend Steven, the unofficial King of Double Exposures, gave me a few tips, the most important being to push your film a stop or two. He does it using aperture, but I did it by setting my camera ISO to 800 for 400 speed film. It took my brain a minute to understand why this is important, but the way it makes sense to me is to remember your film is a negative. When you take a picture, the light exposure is “taking away” material from the film strip that results in your image. If you push your film, it will underexpose it, leaving it a bit dark. Your second shot then “takes away” more of the film material, creating a more ideally exposed image.

Here is the full set of my floral self-portraits, including a few screw-ups that I just like aesthetically.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.