Author: Michelle LaRiviere

Michelle is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and teacher. She is also a Reiki Master and life coach, specializing in guided soul work. Her art has been exhibited nationally in Canada, as well as in Italy, the UK, and the United States. Her practice includes traditional as well as digital media.

Less is More

The Dunes of Time

Todays daily prompt is called No Excess, and it asks:

“Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little.” – Edna Ferber

Do you agree with this statement on excess?

As an artist and photographer, my take on this topic comes from a feminist aesthetic, and there’s something I’ve been meaning to get off my chest.

I’ve been a member of the premier photography website, 500px, for a few weeks now, and one thing that I’ve begun to find a little annoying is that the site is chock full of sexed up photographs – photos that perpetuate the fetishization of the young, sexualized female stereotype. For those of you who have been following my blog and projects, you’ll know that the topic is near and dear to my heart.

The 500px website is intended to be a community where serious photographers can showcase their best work, network, comment, critique, and learn from each other. While the All Categories page does feature a mix of subjects, though peppered throughout with girls and more girls, the People category leans heavily towards “girls” and sultry models. You just can’t seem to escape the hundreds of nude, scantily clad, or even fully dressed and provocatively posed vixens beckoning the viewer, to um, “take” them, if you catch my drift. Below is a sampling of the ratio that I’m talking about in the People category.

This is a sampling from the People category, which illustrates my point
This is a sampling from the People category, which illustrates my point

It’s not that I have anything against boudoir-type photography or skin magazines – they have their niche – but frankly I find the vast majority of this endless glut of images quite boring and unimaginative. They possess no mystery, no subtlety, no originality, no art. And trust me – I’ve spent hours scouring the site for something unique and truly beautiful in this genre. They are there, but very far and few between.

So in considering the statement regarding excess by Edna Ferber, it is certainly true that an avalanche of tits, ass, skin and come-fuck-me faces and poses does nothing but dull the senses and perpetuate the objectification of women and girls. In this sense, less would not be a bad thing – in fact, less would be more in all the right ways – more subtlety, more taste, more mystique, and more imagination.

Requiem for a Grandmother

Mother
I saw them yesterday . . .
papery hands
at euchre tables
laying down hearts
and memories of another time
when bleeding was a different colour
and young women howled fiercely at the moon
with newborn babes clutched tightly at their breasts.
 
I saw them yesterday . . .
in silvery disguises
covering their hearts
with diamonds
and thin-lipped smiles
half-heartedly masking
the haunting of loneliness
and lost children.
 
Where is the place where grandmothers go to weep?
 
I am awake in the dark
lost in raw knowing
that these scars were carved
fresh and deep
to remind me that
I am still . . .
 
A mother.

by Michelle LaRiviere

September 24th, 2014
Windsor, Ontario

The “Artified” Photograph

Cat Nap

Because I painted for many years in traditional media (oils and acrylics), I’ve always had mixed feelings about photographs that are photoshopped to look like paintings. I always thought of it as cheating. There is a certain aesthetic and sense of awe that goes with knowing that someone actually physically created a visually stunning work of art with brushes and paint, and that they may have spent weeks, months, or even years completing it. Well, I’ve had to readjust my thinking a little.

In a previous post I wrote a tutorial about how mediocre photos can be transformed into stunning black and white images. Today I want to talk about other options for photos that would otherwise be headed for the trash bin. They may be a bit blurry, orange, unflattering, uninteresting, or whatever. While it’s true that many do belong in the trash, others may have a little something . . . even if you can’t quite put your finger on it right away. This is how it begins.

I tend to take a LOT of photos, which has led to my son referring to me some years ago as the paparazzi – inaccurate in my opinion because I don’t stalk celebrities. However, in certain situations, I will just keep shooting. For example, the photo above is one of about thirty during an impromptu “session” that began while we were waiting at a pub for my daughter-in-law to get off work and join us. I just happened to have my little Canon Powershot SD780 with me. Nobody was posing – it was just a case of mom playing with one of her toys again. Last night while doing some computer housekeeping, I came very close to deleting the entire series, one picture at a time. Eventually getting down to a handful of so-so pics that I just couldn’t bring myself to get rid of,  I was determined to make them work. Enter Topaz.

Almost deleted this one!

Topaz is a photo-editing plug-in that has a lot of presets with effects that you can customize. Anyway, feeling that the photos were unsalvageable with basic editing, I decided to try out various effects (that were frankly quite hideous), but then I stumbled upon one that worked. I gasped. It definitely looked like a painting – one with the style and subject-matter loosely reminiscent of a Normal Rockwell. So I gave the same treatment to half a dozen others, adjusted the colour tones in Lightroom, and posted three on my son’s Facebook wall. He must have been impressed because he made one of them his profile pic.

Now I have a different perspective on “artified” photographs. Although I don’t plan on going crazy with it, at least I know that there are options for saving some photos from being deleted forever.