Exposed by Me

More to follow here (this post)...gradually. As explanation, I've referred a couple times to an article from this blog I sold to a magazine. It's not a big deal - except to me - I've done bigger deals in the past (see "Newsweek in time"). My content in this upcoming article was personal in a way I would not have written unvieled from the blog. So I feel extremely vulnerable about it but also driven to say what I want to say when offered this opportunity, which is frighteningly taboo (which is why they noticed it) - and unintentionally potentially hurtful, but I will write more about the piece itself in the next post.

This post is about the photo shoot, which was really scary, and which I was very unprepared for. The magazine requires a full page photograph, and although I want my concern to be about what I said, I also want the photo to go with and enhance what I said, and to represent me (- which it will by my unpreparedness!). I didn't feel good so hadn't even washed in hair in a couple of days. (I did wear make-up which is rare.) The weather was bad so we had to do the shoot in my dark little apartment, which makes the whole thing more intimate (BUT, on the bright side, it meant not only free - but PAID portraits of my cat with me! - so I'm trying to stay focused on that, if all else fails.) My apartment had all kind of random things around I wouldn't have wanted around. And I accidentally bleached the only shirt I felt comfortable doing this in, right before the photographer (Tony Burditt) got there. So I wore pink - which I never wear - but which is definitely relevant to the article (and pale enough to pass for ivory).

I had asked the magazine if I would be able to see the layout before other people I don't know were going to see it just to feel more secure about it, and they said no, but the photographer was nice enough to send me the raw copies of the whole shoot. So what I'm doing is altering them thoroughly and making a creative game of it (like did you notice how cool the top of the curtains look on that first one?) and publishing my version first (gradually) so I will feel some control over the process. I realize that since I have trepidation about linking my face to my words here,too, this project might be counterproductive, but I'm unimportant enough to be able to un-publish this if it feels like too much.

That was probably an unnecessary prelude, but here is some of my version of my photo shoot: