[parkerwoods]

The Ransom Ltd. team and I have been working nonstop to make this project materialize and I am pleased to finally announce that Momo Tokyo will be my first published book and is now available for pre-order! 

I had never been to Japan before the two weeks I spent in Tokyo photographing the content for this book. The idea came as an afterthought–a small personal project to keep me occupied in a city I didn’t know–but quickly became the purpose of my stay. Over the course of 12 days, I carried the peach-colored (”momo” in Japanese) backdrop and (heavy) c-stand with me on foot for 100 miles. The backdrop became like a character to me in its own right and I soon felt that I was simply taking snapshots of a friend as it helped to contextualize my vignettes of the city. This book was both literally and figuratively a labor of love and I could not be more excited to share it with you. 

Momo Tokyo is not only an exercise in contextualizing my first experiences with Japanese culture but also stands as a testament to the idiom, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Every image from this project has a unique story as to how, where, and why I photographed the backdrop as well as the difficulties I encountered in doing so. As special thanks for pre-ordering the book you will receive a print from the project with a handwritten note detailing the story behind the photograph. These narratives will give the reader an inside look into what it was like to experience Japan for the first time and why these photographs are so meaningful to me.   

Pre-Orders for Momo Tokyo are available now!

[christos]

Jhonattan Burjack by Antonio Eugenio

[kendrajk]

Informative Ancient Egypt Comics: BROS

Our 1st place contest winner requested a Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep comic as their prize.

[samandriel]

I took a class about Ancient Egypt last semester and we had a whole lecture dedicated to talking about how gay Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were.
Their tomb walls were decorated with scenes of them ignoring their wives in favor of embracing each other. In one scene, the couple is seated at a banquet table that is usually reserved for a husband and wife. There’s an entire motif of Khnumhotep holding lotus flowers which in ancient Egyptian tradition symbolizes femininity. Khnumhotep offers the lotus flower to Niankhkhnum, something that only wives were ever depicted as doing for their husbands. In fact, Khnumhotep is repeatedly depicted as uniquely feminine, being shown smaller and shorter than his partner Niankhkhnum and being placed in the role of a woman. Size is a big deal in Egyptian art, husbands are almost always shown as being larger and taller than their wives. So for two men of equal status to be shown in once again, a marital fashion, is pretty telling. Not to mention they were literally buried together which is the strongest bond two people could share in ancient Egypt, as it would mean sharing the journey to the afterlife together.
And yet 90% of the academic text about these two talks about these clues in vague terms and analyze the great “brotherhood” they shared, and the enigma of Khnumhotep being depicted as feminine. Apparently it’s too hard for archaeologists to accept homosexuality in the ancient world, as well as the possibility of trans individuals.

[aeacustero]

On the last note, I was walking around the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and there is a mummy on exhibit. It caught my attention because the panel that was describing it was talking about how it was a woman’s body in a male coffin and wow, the Egyptian working that day really screwed that up. My summary, not actual words, sorry I can’t remember verbatim but it basically said that someone screwed up.

They claimed that the Egyptians screwed up a burial.

The Egyptians. Screwed up. A burial.

Now I’m not an expert in Ancient Egypt but from what I know, and what the exhibit was telling me, burials and the afterlife and all that jazz DEFINED the Egyptian religion and culture. They don’t just ‘screw up’. So instead of thinking outside the box for two seconds and wonder why else a genetically female body was in a male coffin, the ‘researchers’ blatantly disregard the rest of their research and decided to call it a screw up. Instead of, you know, admitting that maybe this mummy presented as male during his life and was therefore honorably buried as he was identified. But it would be too much of a stretch to admit that a transgender person could have existed back then.

(Sorry I can’t find any sources online and it’s been like 2 years but it stuck in my mind)

[choice36c]

THIS PIC IS A CLASSIC, SOME OF THE GREATEST AND MOST TALENTED RIGHT HERE!!

America’s most known African-American athletes gather to hear Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) give his reasons for rejecting the draft, United States, June 4, 1967.

Front row: Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul Jabar (formerly Lew Alcindor).

Back row: Carl Stokes, Walter Beach, Bobby Mitchell, Sid Williams, Curtis McClinton, Willie Davis, Jim Shorter, and John Wooten.

[heyblackrose]

Awww

[flexiblefish]

Archie Panjabi - Emmy Winner - 2010

[schwarmerei1]

Emmy winner who had to buy her own dress off the rack because no designer would loan one. (She then auctioned her dress for charity.)

[flexiblefish]

And let’s not forget what happened when she first arrived on the red carpet: 

 "it was like going to Disneyworld for the first time… And then it all went downhill. I was on the red carpet and you have to queue up, and get on one of the dots so they can take a photo. They’re screaming for the woman in front of me, and then it’s my turn… So I come up to this dot, and every single photographer in the line puts their camera down… So I was all dressed up on my biggest night ever and that moment happened. I wanted the floor to open up. Literally, they just …" she mimes a photographer lowering a camera, looking bored. “That woke me up.”

 Panjabi went on to win the Emmy for best supporting actress that night, beating Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss, as well as her co-star in The Good Wife, Christine Baranski. She was also one of only two Brits to win an award that night. “And then I went to take the pictures at the end, and I’m kissing the award, quietly thinking: ‘Yeah, fuck you.’”

[Source: The Guardian]

[acceber74]

I’ve been a fan of hers since she played Jess’s sister in Bend It Like Beckham.