Blog rec: "This Is Not Porn"

I stumbled upon a photo blog yesterday that I wanted to share with you, This Is Not Porn. It is bizarrely named, in my opinion, as I think it's countering an expectation nobody is likely to have going in. What it is really is a collection of photos of famous people that were taken in informal settings while doing ordinary, normal-person things. Sometimes they are funny or silly things, but they are the sort of shots that people take of each other when they're hanging around enjoying themselves.

Unintentionally hilariously tragic photo of Marlon Brando hovering over an open fridge in a harbinger of morbid obesity to come


Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward


Elizabeth Taylor feeding the pigeons

I believe there's something holy in the ordinary, in the humble things and activities that make up the everyday of life. It's part of the reason I love homey things like crockery and linens and furniture. They are comforting to us, we all have need of them, and what they provide for us physically and emotionally is pretty universal for all humans-- plates and silverware enable the important ritual of having dinner together, linens make us feel comfy and safe in the beds we all sleep in, we all want to sit on comfy couches when we're hanging out in our living rooms. So I've always been interested by the ordinary details about people that are mostly decided to not be important enough to mention. I wonder what Julius Caesar's favorite food was. I wonder what games Abraham Lincoln played with his children. In that we all have and do and understand these things, they are in a way the most real things about us.

Harry Belafonte and Martin Luther King, Jr.


Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney washing dishes

I think we see celebrities as a breed apart from the majority of the human race in a lot of ways, and to a certain extent I think they are. They often get so much money and so much power that they can escape from a lot normal responsibilities like balancing their own checkbook or cleaning their own house or walking their own dog. But that's why I particularly like this one of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney washing dishes together. It's so normal, so real, for two dudes whose lives became so rarefied and so separate from regular folks. It's like, why would Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney ever have to wash dishes? They're so rich and powerful they probably never had to do any chore they didn't want to. They could just pay their staff members to do it. But it's real-person logic that if you use dishes, they have to get clean somehow. Seeing them adhere to real-person logic even though they have the ability to separate from it in a weird way reinforces humanity to me. That as much as your circumstances may change you, your essential humanity is a tough thing to shake.

Finally, seeing that somebody even thought to take a lot of these pictures just warms my heart. Imagine you are married to, or the child of, or the parent of, or some other relation to some famous important person. That person is photographed constantly, under the best of circumstances, in images carefully composed with a team of professionals on hand to make sure they look their best. And yet, which such a proliferation of flattering images of this person available, you still feel compelled to take awkward, clumsy shots of them where they look silly and unbeautiful, just because you want to commemorate the moment you're in. This is your vacation, your hanging with your friends, your regular happy moment that you want to make sure you remember. Again, circumstances may change us, but there's a ton of commonality to simply being human.

David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Lou Reed

Or it's just something crazy and awesome, like Sean Connery in a wedding dress or Salvador Dali walking his anteater.