Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
March is Women’s History Month when we’ve been celebrating women and their accomplishments, power, and energy. We are hearing the stories they have to tell, and The Luupe encourages women to tell them through photography.
Self-Portraits by Women is a project The Luupe started to honor and celebrate women. It’s a collection of wonderful self-portraits, but also some incredible stories that follow them.
I enjoy learning about people who made history and paved the way for the generations after them. This photo shows three of these women captured together way back in the late 19th century. These are the first three licensed women doctors from their respective countries who obtained a degree in Western medicine.
Los Angeles-based Margo Moritz began learning the craft of photography at the age of 13. Since then, she has worked as an editorial and more recently a commercial photographer and taught courses at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and elsewhere.
For the past few years, one of Margo’s ongoing projects has featured portraits and lifestyle images of teenage girls. For Margo, the natural evolution of this project was to offer them an intensive photography course.
Fashion accessory brand HEX has released a mini-series that focuses on women photographers. Appropriately titled Women in Focus, the series highlights five female creatives who talk about the challenges and successes of being a woman in a predominantly male profession. And for all the ladies out there, these five great women also offer some advice on navigating the photography space as a woman.
Bartram Trail High School in St. Johns County, Florida recently came under fire for photoshopping girls’ bodies in yearbook photos. After their yearbook was published, 80 female students reported that their photos were altered to remove any hint of cleavage. The students and their parents got furious, and so did the public.
It’s International Women’s Day, a perfect day to remind ourselves how many powerful women there are around us. Danish photographer Angelina Wiese Devine has published a photography project that celebrates these strong women. But they’re not politicians, celebrities, or anyone you’d see on TV and in the newspaper. They’re everyday heroes that live right there in your neighborhood.
I chatted a bit with Angelina, a powerful woman herself, and she told me a bit about her project and the idea behind it. And of course, she shared the photos with DIYP along with short stories about the amazing women in them.
This weekend, I took a photo walk with my cousin, who is also a professional photographer. We were joking about a bottle of nail polish in a mesh pocket of her camera bag. “Have you ever considered writing an article about the content of a girl’s camera bag?” she asked. “As a matter of fact, I have.” I’d totally forgot about it, and I’m glad that she reminded me. You know, it’s always fun for me to find out what other photographers use for the job. We took a peek inside a wedding photojournalist’s bag thanks to Ben Kelmer. Even the former White House photographer Pete Souza showed the gear he normally has in the bag. But I wanted to make this a little more personal and fun. So, I open my photography bag for you to give you an answer to the question you never asked: what’s inside a girl’s photo bag?
An Iranian music streaming website Melovaz recently came under fire for removing images of women from album covers. World-famous artists like Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Lana Del Ray were removed from the artwork of their own albums. What’s more, if the album covers featured men – these men were left intact, while the women were photoshopped out.
BlackRapid has launched a new shoulder sling camera strap especially for female photographers. The Nicole Elliott strap aims to reduce the pressure on your neck and shoulders and to do it with style. But the inspiration for the strap has raised some eyebrows (including mine). The company emphasizes that “the way women have been carrying their babies for centuries” is what inspired the design of the camera strap for ladies.
A photographer from Belarus, Dasha Buben, has published a powerful and meaningful project titled I Survived. She has photographed the survivors of domestic abuse in Belarus for over a year, and her aim is to help them love themselves again.
Dasha’s portraits don’t tell the story of victims. She sees her subjects as heroes who have gone through a lot, yet have found a way to survive and get back on their feet. I have talked to Dasha about this amazing project, and I learned of the challenges and emotions she and her subjects have gone through during the photo shoots.
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