To the hot summer breeze and to letting go.

Feminism in translations

This will be a series in which I translate well known feminists works or parts of their writings from Swedish to English and talk a little about my point of view. Let us begin.

Written by Fanny Åström:

Top 10 horrible things men have done

  

No 3 - Emotionally exploited us

Because I didn't ask my partner to do all the emotional labour I also have no responsibility for it becoming that way.

Men exploit women emotionally in relationships and that means we have no strength left for ourselves or each other. This practice lays the groundwork for the patriarchy and is thereby one of mens worst crimes. And not only that, they make us do it voluntarily. Because we are dependent on his validation of us to become whole (or as whole as possible) human beings in this society we then bow to his superiority. We even desire oppression.

 No 8 - Not being able to handle feelings

Because I have no contact with my emotional life I will lie and say everything is fine. Instead it becomes up to you to interpret my signals and adjust your self. That's handy because then I don't have to take any responsibility.

 To say that things are fine when they are not. To not comfort you when you cry because you are "too old for that". To make his own shortcomings into that of the woman by telling her not to "cry like a baby". Or just all the other ways men refuse to handle his own and other peoples feelings. That fucking sucks. I am tired of curling men who  DOESN'T GET IT or doesn't want to get it! Luckily I don't have to do that anymore and that is something that fills me with joy every day. It's such a relief to not have to take care of mens retarded and shit-boring emotional life. It's like there is never any movement? Just an endless ranting.

 No 9 - Make us doubt our selves and eachother

She went into a relationship where she got less relationship VOLUNTARILY. And because it was voluntary it's automatically right.

They instil a feeling of that we can's trust our selves, our relationships with eachother or thoughts. Simply: we are forced to internalise their hatred of us into our selves. It's awful because it makes us hate our selves and eachother. This internalised hate of women is so difficult to stop and it's constantly topped up because we have men surrounding us.

I chose these 3 points because I want to talk about the thing that underpins our society: Mens lack of emotional labour. I will probably come back to this because it is so fundamentally saturating. Not teaching our boys to do emotional labour is by far the most damage one can do individually to our society. Not only does it leave the boys them selves to grow up into some sort of deluded half humans, distant from them selves and everyone around them, unable to express their own emotions or form lasting connections. We also create an army of emotional abusers. 

The patriarchy will never fall unless we stop living under the pressure of mens emotional control. There are two choices really. Either keep talking and hope that the men around you will one day understand what we are saying and be there when they are needed and not suck us dry of all energy. Or cut out these emotional vampires entirely from your life.

Stop living in the illusion that men are somehow easier than us, that we just complicate things, the reality is the most simple explanation. They just don't give a shit. They don't! not on the same level. They don't see you, they don't see them selves. Don't doubt your self, when he sais things like "I only give compliments when you least expect it", it means "I enjoy my superiority over you".  When he sais "What do you expect me to do?" in that tone of voice that we all know, hear "Don't expect me to be there for you as I expect you to be there for me". Don't doubt that hollow feeling, the feeling that if you could just do the right thing or feel the right way, it would all be so wonderful. You are not the only one who should be making it wonderful. And not in a way that can be bought or silenced. If you ask to be seen he has a responsibility to see you, you do not have a responsibility to want less! He isn't going to want less. Why are you not "this way" and accepted for that but he is? You should not be expected to trust someone who isn't there, who outright refuses to reassure you, or who would use your vulnerability against you to protect their own feelings of inadequacy. The message is always the same. Settle or lose. 

Now, I'm still in the category of the ones who still try to save my relationships with men. But studies show that women's mental health improves after divorces and that women with strong female relationships do far better than women surrounded by men and that is no coincidence. Make no mistake, I have never felt as terrible as since the day I decided to approach men as whole human beings. They are not. Not because they couldn't be, we are all born the same..but because we all made them that way. And we need to stop so it isn't too late for the next generation as well. I need all men in my life to step up and do their emotional labour right now! 

The only time I give you emotional validation is when I feel the relationship is threatened. Why should I make you feel safe and loved unnessecarily?

As a last point I just want to add this one:

 No 6 - Do not appreciate us

Despite claiming our whole world they have no appreciation for what they get. This is so incredibly ignorant and disgusting. Can't you at least appreciate the patriarchy if you're going to insist on keeping half the population in oppression? Isn't that the least one can ask? God, if I had been a man I would have damn well enjoyed it, but instead they walk around in a cloud of nothingness. Such a fucking waste.

Read the whole blogpost here.

If you read Swedish, go in and check her out, she is amazing.

Tea stands for Tudor

 

 So I finished the Tudor era shirt. It's made out of 5 squares really, just like any pre-industrial shirt, plus cuffs and collar. I felt like it needed something though. It's cotton even though that would probably not have been the case in actual Tudor times but I can't really fix that.. but I can fix the colour! So I did what I do with most things and dipped it in tea. It was a tea flavoured "berries and biscuits" so it smells nice as well. My fingers now hurt from all the hand sewing but it is totally worth it for the relative accuracy! And the child didn't mind wearing it, that's always a small victory.

Next up is the trousers and doublet.

Nightmares in June

Sometimes I come across this illness..PTSD. Much like being a psychopath it's one of the mental illnesses that leave physical scars on the brain, in this case it affects short term memory and emotion control the worst which often leads to confusion, exhaustion and difficulties communicating or recognising ones feelings. Nightmares and insomnia is common. It also makes you hyper aware of your surroundings, like subtle changes in peoples faces and tones of voices.

 Or so I hear.

 Ironically I frequently forget that I have PTSD and it's like a new discovery every time. Every day perks there.. 

For anyone who doesn't know, PTSD stands for post traumatic stress syndrome and comes from living through traumatic events without properly healing. It feels a lot like I imagine it would feel if you one day woke up covered in a full body tattoo that someone else designed and you had to work on removing that for the rest of your life while people ask you why you got the tattoo if you hate it so much. Once you are done you might not even look like the same person. And no, not everyday is a battle. Having a terrible memory has saved me from so much pain and while I can't remember my past I feel truly happy. Until I remember. Until something happens. Because it is never from the inside, this is not an inside disease, it comes from the outside and works its way in. When the trigger happens the world stops and I fall back into the rabbit hole..and the clearest thought in my head is how much who ever I ask for help is going to hate me for presuming to ruin their day with my trauma. So I try. I try to climb up, try to forget again, try to see the light. But I can't say it doesn't create a deep hate for the ones looking down in the hole while I climb. Their backbound hands and encouraging words mock my struggle, I never asked to be strong on my own. The worst thing I find is not that I'm broken. It's that most people are fine.

The thing I find have helped the most is having people around who will reassure me I'm not insane (well..figuratively) and to put responsibility where it really lies, not focus so much on my guilt and shame. 

June is PTSD awareness month (apparently) so if I can give one advice if you know someone with an unwanted full body tattoo.. Don't fix, just love. And love as obvious as you can. We can fix our selves.

"Divorced, beheaded and died.."

 

In a little over a week my son is having a Historical class trip back to Tudor times (16th century) so I'm now hand-stitching until my fingers bleed,as you do, for the most authentic looking costume of all. I'm making the shirt first. I made it out of an oversized pillowcase from a charity shop and it's supposed to be a peasants costume so there are really not much details, just plain white with strings to tie at the neck and the wrists. I couldn't resist making a simple ruff collar though, it just looks so much more Tudor. I've made it according to a pattern of a Tudor shirt and sewn the seems that show by hand. As a last thing I will dye it with tea to make it a darker more worn in shade but for now I will let my fingers rest. 

Good night.

It's a new world.

As the old chapter closes a new one begins and with that comes a new era of Victorian pictures. 

So far I've started out photographing the people who were there in the very beginning, trying to create a perspective on time passing, but I wont end it there. In the past I was so focused on it looking authentic, to achieve that serious and passive look that was all the rage in the olden days, that I lost some of what had lured me in in the first place. The human aspect of it all. How, despite being a hundred years apart, we are all people with lives and thoughts and feelings. I want to bring some of that back now. I want to create odd pictures. Pictures that communicate silently. 

A while ago I found a book about the works of Toulouse Lautrec. I've always liked his style but in there is something specific.. Aside from the music hall paintings and those of known people of the day he also did a few of his paintings while living inside a brothel. They may not be photographs, but they could be ground for some very interesting inspirations.. 

A little later some one gave me a book of Toulouse Lautrec posters to put on my walls and it has now affected me so much that I've dyed my hair ginger, the most popular hair colour in the paintings. So to the sounds of Erik Satie..It is so on..!

Welcome to the new chapter.

Photographing the 1880's. Life inbetween

It had been over a decade since the first and the latest off my Victorian pictures. A lot of things have happened in between those days. I'm glad to have captured the people that has passed through my life. 

In 2007 and 2008 I was pretty busy creating a baby so the pictures were left behind. I did persuade a few people to let me capture them though. Most memorable of these I think is the first appearance of my son in the 2008 art nouveau style one. I remember dressing up my 4 month old in a vintage baby cap and a white shirt and photographing him in a box. Part of me thinks his early start may have contributed to him being such an excellent model now, over 8 years later.

In 2010 I made an attempt to simplify my photos. I focused more on creating the right environment and be a little more..casual. By now I had some photographic help from my Victorian partner in crime and one of my favourite creative collaborator, Amanda. I had the fortune at this point to be living in one of my favourite houses in the town where I grew up, a turn of the century wooden house and much of the inspiration came from the house it self.

 Before I packed up and immigrated I wanted to have some recollection of my last time in Scandinavia. My mother in law asked me to make her a costume and I got to take some pictures as well. But mostly it was me, my son and Amanda playing around in the sunny April afternoons. Little did we know it would be the last ones.

During these 10 years one person was born and another person has died. In 2016 when I picked up my camera again it was in her memory I decided to continue. She died in early February from aggressive leukaemia and with that she closed this 10 year chapter of mine. I felt like the least I could do was to finish what I started so when I found the empty second hand album I had always put it off for I decided it was time. By the end of August 2016 I once again moved away and the album ended with the people who had been there with me while I cried over her last words. 

The very last picture was, of course, of her. 

For my beloved soul-sister Amanda. Until we meet again.

Photographing the 1880's, inspiration.

As I have probably said 100 times, I like the 1880's because it's at the very end of one chapter in time and at the same time at the very beginning of the chapter we are still living in. In Swedish the saying for the olden days is literally 'in the 19th century' and the earliest time we can recreate in clothes without looking decidedly dressed up is the late 1800's. And every time we switch on a light we do that same thing that once fascinated the late Victorians. 

Or maybe we have already turned the page and I just haven't noticed yet..

I may not have said quite as many times that I like Victorian photographs because they are so very relateable, the people in them look like people just like us, while at the same time we can almost be certain that they are dead at this point. It's like a modern version of the medieval 'dance of death', they were once just like us and one day we will all join them in whatever follows. It's like a welcoming hand reaching out through the silver coated paper. 

Maybe that's why I like the ones where people smile the most. 

They generally look gravely serious. Contrary to popular belief it wasn't that it took so long to hold a smile, not by the end of the century anymore, although I'm sure that contributed. It was just not considered 'classy' to smile. Imagine if there was one picture of you taken in your lifetime (or death, but I'll get to that another time), you would want that picture to represent you as well as possible I'm sure. Well, most Victorians wanted to be seen as respectable, composed, genuine..and they thought it ridiculous to smile in a picture. It's for the same reason as the less well to do made their best efforts to look better off in that one single picture. Would you spoil your only chance of being remembered?

But I look for the same thing in dead people as I do in the living ones. Humanity. I like the pictures that show the reality or the unshielded..the slightly off but warm and and deep and kind. People where they look just like us or anyone in the street.

I think I lost that throughout the years of trying to create authenticity in my pictures. In this new chapter of my life and my photographs I will take a turn off to the side street and try to find my way back to that.

Back to the beginning.

I want to take you back to the beginning. 

I remember the back parlour of my grandmothers house. She called it 'salin' and it is where she held her prayer meetings. On an old dresser by the back wall there stood two photographs, one of each of her parents. They were both black and white, the one of her mother clearly older, and both dead by the early 90's when I remember them first. I've always had a fascination for old photographs. They have and air of "where you are now, we once were and what we are now so will you one day be". Quite morbid for a child, I admit, but to me it had a feeling of reassurance.

In 2006 I bought the first camera I had ever owned. In 2005 I had broken with tradition, burned bridges and settled into a rather unconventional relationship with the man I eventually married. Those two events might seem completely disconnected but they are in fact the main sparks that lit my 1880's fire. He was an artist. The kind who questions life. Shirtlessly painting and smoking on balconies while barely affording to eat. He let me in and encouraged me to pursue my artistic dreams. Everything that had been suppressed for convention and that my inner voice told me was 'unnecessary' flooded out of me. I already knew this was what I wanted to try to do.
For the first time in the spring of 2006 I had enough spare money of my own to buy my self a little red camera. With that I started to document my world and the people in it and it occured to me that even with that I could try to make pictures similar to the ones on my grandmothers dresser. If I could imagine it, why not at least try..

With cheap cameras, library books and apprentice levelled use of photoshop on an internet-less computer I made my first attempts. People I had only just gotten to know posed, sometimes reluctantly, in my poorly lit one room. In clothes I found or made. Some of those people became friends I'm still close to 11 years later. 

I didn't know it then..but these pictures, however crude, were to mark the beginning of a chapter that only really ended with this year. They became just as much a record of us as people as it did an artistic experiment. 

Maybe that's why I will keep on making them. To record the changes of people while keeping them confined to my favourite decade in time. Like a lens through which people can be someone else and them selves entirely at the same time. Because in all other pictures all over the internet and in peoples phones, and there is a lot more of them now than when this started, the surrounding changes, fashion changes..but in my pictures only the person changes. Everything else stays the same. 

So this is where I started. With a base of my sister Erika, Carlos, Sakina and my self. And who ever I could persuade to join us. There was a lot of experimentation. Not all good! and very little access to..well everything. But they definitely have a special place in my heart. Like an ugly baby.

In the autumn of that year I started fashion school and with the improving sewing techniques  this was never going to end, was it..

Photographing the 1880's, Maidstone.

 

Before we left my beloved Maidstone I decided I would immortalise us that were left, the people closest to me, the only way I know how. Through the medium of  tintypes. By that I obviously mean dressing everyone up and posing them in the style of the 1880's. It had been a hard year. And my time with them was coming to an end. I can see by now that those are the times when I tend to do these on a larger scale, as a good bye and an attempt to capture a time almost gone by.

Covering the windows in brown paper and re arranging the furniture in our small one bedroom flat I managed to make something resembling a photo studio. The wash line hung heavy with drapes and curtains for weeks.. Some of the pictures were taken outside, sometimes in our garden where I stole my neighbours furniture for an afternoon of tea drinking. Others were taken down by my favourite river walk where you can get lost thinking you're in a Hardy novel all day. 

I spent some of my happiest days in this place.

In the end though, it is the people that make the place what it is. That and the sunlight shining through the leaves. And the thinglassed windows. I will never forget the place where my child made his first friends, where wine tea was a passtime and I touched history with my bare hands. 

True love grew in this place.

 So how did it turn out? Well..

After a day drying in the August sun, as the summer was fading away, I gave my hard copies away like I promised, packed my dresses and hats and photopapers into a box. The album still contains the memories from those days. The pressed flowers and clues to what's to come.

Thank you all. For all the good and the bad and the forever memorable days.

 

Photographing the 1880's

There is something about the 1880's that appeals to me. It has a sense of being on the cusp of the modern world but still very much in the old world. I think I find Victorian times so interesting because it has quite a lot in common with our time. We are also going through a time of fast technological changes, mass migrations and new ideas that seem to shake up things we thought we knew. It has also sometimes been said that we only live at the end of the era that started with the late Victorians, and that I find incredibly fascinating.

So to try to capture this favourite period of mine I have, for quite some time now, dressed up and photographed people close to me. It has become a collection not just of art or history but also of life it self. Because although the world I've constructed is somewhat imaginary..the people in the pictures are or were once all people that played an important part in my life. They are not random.

I think I will start from the end. And the beginning.

The latest pictures are, aside from one addition, actually people I had in my very first pictures. I found the contrast quite interesting. We have all changed as much as mu photoshop skills in the last 10 years!

Aside from how much I have clearly learned throughout these years about both the 19th century and grain filters, I can't help but think of how much has happened to us all between those pictures. In 2006 we were only almost adults in one small flat living on noodles and I made sets out of doll furniture and old books.. 11 years later we are in 3 different countries, have houses and careers and children. We fell out and back in again. Some of us went to America. Some slept in the desert. Some of us got married. Most of us lost our way at some point. But we do still live on noodles sometimes. There were places this life took us to that we could have never imagined. 10 years is a long time. Looking at these pictures makes me glad that after everything we are all still alive and we all still know each other.

 I hope I'll be able to say the same 10 years from now.

 And last but not least, possibly the most important addition of all. 

Our very own Artful Dodger. 

A new beginning

There once was a blog,the most wonderful blog, with content so sparkling and strange. But that blog was owned by a woman so careless who didn't do her backup and one day, after a series of unexpected events, the blog was no longer accessible through google and she said 'Damn it,there goes years of writing'. The year and a half went by and after a couple of attempts the blog picked it sef up again, realised it had aged more than it should have, and dusted it self off. It emigrated and changed name. But it is as unwavering as ever. 

Welcome back.

On a serious note, I dedicate this fresh new blog to one of the loves of my life. Until we meet again.