a bitch, currently residing at a fine Welsh bed-and-breakfast establishment
[click image to enlarge it]
There’s a discussion going on over at Chris Dillow’s place about whether or not guest house owners should be allowed to discriminate against gay couples. Whatever is implied by Chris’s musings on the matter, markets are not the solution to this problem. As I’ve pointed out here before, well-run markets don’t undermine prejudices, they’re just an efficient means for people to express them.
One commenter illustrates a point by reference to a photographer being made to shoot gay weddings. What makes me smile about this is that, happy as I am to photograph homosexuals (and/or blacks) getting hitched, my biggest fear—as the offspring of a black mother and a white father—is that a mixed-race couple will try to hire me. If you have to take a natural-light portrait of two faces together and one is very dark and the other is very pale then it’s a bitch to get the exposure right for both of them.
Talking of juxtapositions of black and white…
7 Comments
Hello Pootergeek!
I’m a Labour (in)activist who has just started blogging. Let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Nance
PS. Can I get on the blogroll?
I’ll have to read your blog for a few at least a few weeks and monitor it for ideological purity before I even think about putting it on the blogroll, Nancy, but you can have that comment link for free.
I once read a serious article on that topic, but as it applies to film lighting rather than photographic exposures. If I remember rightly it accused Hollywood of subtle racism in the way it lit films with black and white actors as the lighting was always set for the white faces.
I think it may have been pushing the point too far, but it did make me pay more attention to such films.
Don’t want to depress Nancy but my fine, erudite, leftish blog (now alas defunct) never made it onto the fabulous Pooter blog roll (whatever that might be).
Perhaps it was because I’m still a Labour activist, probably about as old as his Dad or that I sometimes wear trousers that are unpleasantly tight neither for wearer nor yet for the casual observer…
If you have to take a natural-light portrait of two faces together and one is very dark and the other is very pale…
Sounds like the old man and my step-mum. They’re 10 year anniversay is coming up soon. Mebbe I’ll throw in a few hundred bucks to stitch up the Pooter for an afternoon. Make ‘im sweat a bit.
Pleh. S’what incident metering’s for. Or average the two. Or set the caucasian at about Zone VI. Or sunny-16, rate the film a stop slower and do the rest in the darkroom where it belongs. Or all 5
Pop into Halfords and get some spray paint. Sorted.