Authenticity
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Complicating Gendered Lighting
We don’t think of light as gendered, but boy (see what I did there), do we gender it. Women should have every crease filled. (We call it “beauty light.”) Men are allowed rough texture and deep shadows (where our feelings live). There are obvious exceptions… but they’re exceptions. Every photographer I learned from set it…
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I’m So Tired of Manufactured Authenticity
Why do we keep trying to manufacture authenticity? Right now everything’s BTS: “authenticity” that has to keep proving its bona fides. When someone named the “Gen Z shake” I’d seen in so many vertical videos, all I could think was “Hurray… more performative bullshit.” Stripping away production value doesn’t make you more real, any more…
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Who’s the expert again?
It’s telling that the headshot generators compete on accuracy. They’re racing to engineer what a camera does naturally. AI averages everything it’s seen, matches patterns, and spits out of an image of you. Mostly. Because it doesn’t actually KNOW anything, it doesn’t know if you’re you. Sometimes it just goes rogue, for reasons not even…
