Calendar Girls 2020
Calendar Girls 2020 | When Life Throws You Curves, Use Them To Your Advantage

Stand at attention, boys; the Barbie Calendar has arrived. May you use this little mark of the passage of time in 2020 as a gift of irony from the timeless hands of Barbie dolls and their Barbieism with its moto: when life throws you curves, use them to your advantage. We are Barbies, and we play with something to say, and when suggested that we couldn't, we naturally did. It was time to hunt down a good time as the woman icons that we are, here to be perfectly pinned up but never pinned down. We are a celebration of what it is to be female. It's art. There's no question about that. It's merely a matter of how one perceives it and wishes to interpret it. This work captures one of the many great things about modern pin-up culture that it is diversifying, body-positive, supportive, and inclusive. The Folies Barbies are not anonymous objects with no personality, and therefore, we do not stand for the objectifying of women. We are a motley crew that doesn't come from undermining or criticizing others but uses satire to highlight a point. Barbieism is for anyone and everyone that wants it, and it is far from superficial. Barbies represent women who are beautiful and want to show that off with a touch of humor and style.  It's about feeling good in yourself and helping others to do the same being fearless and therefore, powerful. This calendar is not about perfection, but about a purpose. May its markings of time remain reminders of your wildness and allow you to embrace the fundamental female knowledge that respect tastes better than attention and that to laugh is to live.

Indigo
Indigo | Camel Unplugged

Filmmakers have numerous frames in a second. They have minutes or hours, actors and background music to tell a story. As a photographer, you have a single frame only and you have to trust the image to tell the story. Photographs can never be an accessory to the story, they must contain it so the best pictures contain a whole war within one frame. Photographs may be more memorable than moving images because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again. I don't strive for the perfect image. I prefer photographs with some imperfections, mostly they are more simpatico. Perfection is a boring end and is dishonest if we are to believe that photography reflects life. Although a photograph must reflect the truth. This is the unwritten contract between the photographer and the viewer. A photographer must be credible -- no lies, no fakes. Pure, raw and honest. And Camel is the truth.

Barbieism
Barbieism | The Barbie Equation & The Science In Art

Barbieism is the new art movement; a term used to describe the artistic expression of living Barbie dolls, existing in the world. Sourced as Barbietrons in the realm of quantum physics where reality is a mystery, the little dolls spill from the world of atoms into our physical reality, allowing us to steal from both systems with the metaphorical use of Schrödinger's equation. The concept is a steal from 'De Stijl' whose artistic philosophies developed from the appeal of predictability of the laws of science making headlines at the time through significant progress. The differential equation developed when the particle and wave duality of the electron was recognized and was designed to describe the standing circular wave function of the electron, i.e., what it does and used probability to predict what it is. The use of the symbol PSI links the Barbie and Schrödinger equations, and the Barbie equation describes both what Barbies do and what they are; the variable x is replaced by B, for Barbie, explaining the need for the rebellion of Dadaism as an added element. Convenient was the development of the phrase neoplasticism, the new plastic in painting. An ideal of a pure form of the art design with prominent characteristics like abstract, cubism, and suprematism, significantly eradicating all naturalism. Combining art and science with the Barbie catalyst, we use the principle of logic to state that if plastic = art, and Barbie = plastic, then Barbie = art. If art = imagination, and imagination = life, then Barbie = life. This is a perfect Barbie science. ~ Barbie Q

Barbie Q, Prêt-à-Porter, Barbecue
Barbie Q | Prêt-à-Porter Barbie

With wild gestures and a bamboo stick in her hand, because she's speaking Swahili only, ASHANTI sketched in the sand to outline VALERIA how nasty blonde bitches are handled down in untamed Africa. Immediately thereafter, thrilled by this archaic idea, both teamed up to translate it into action.

In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. To us, the difference between the photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from photography as a document. The photographer was thought to be an acute but non-interfering observer. A scribe, not a poet. As people quickly discovered that nobody takes the same picture of the same thing, the supposition that cameras furnish an impersonal, objective image yielded to the fact that photographs are evidence not only of what's there but of what an individual sees, not just a record but an evaluation. It became clear that there was not just a simple activity called seeing, recorded by, aided by cameras but 'photographic seeing'.

Marylin Monroe, Marlene Dietrich
Marilyn Dietrich | Blonde But Not Forgotten

Every portrait that is done with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. In photography, the lens might become your brush, the tripod your easel, and you paint a picture be juggling with the light that passes the shadows. The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation - light waves reflected by objects - a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. Though, there is a terrible truthfulness about photography: the ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty Barbie model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Marylin, and puts a nice Shakespeare verse underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty Barbie girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and he calls her Marlene, but somehow it is no good - it is still Miss Barbie, the model. It is simply too true to be Veruschka.

Tamara de Lempicka, art, collectible barbies photographs, collection, topless nude Barbie doll
Tamara | The Photograph In A Book Is Obviously The Image Of An Image

Folies Barbie's favorite influencer, Spain's Master-Barbarella Mar Gonzalo, has established the 'Dress & pose like your favorite art piece' challenge. Recently, at a Tamara de Lempicka exhibition, she was a bit too shy. Veruschka, her stand-in, has to show what Mar's fans actually would have loved to see.

I am an art collector, a hunter if you will. The collection is me and I am the collection as I fully identify with it. My selection criteria are very intimate. Choosing specific works is a way of recording my emotions materialized by someone else's hands and that is why I really dislike empty shells, aesthetically and satisfying works without any message so why I would like this Barbie might seem odd but it's not. It is, in fact, a simple confession: She is my obsession. The subtly of her challenge leaves me breathless. Valuable things are born in silence and her silent statement that the rules don't apply to her cannot be ignored. She is challenging the limitations imposed on the art and life of a woman. The woman is a challenger of the male gaze, asserting herself. I have a meaningful relationship with her because she triggers a whole chain of personal, intimate associations and she was handmade for somebody like me. My women do not understand that when I engage with them, then I am truly in love. Entirely, wholeheartedly. The interaction is what beauty was designed for but such things by their very nature and design cannot remain in a constant state. I collect them. I capture them and imprison them in my collection there to serve me for my pleasure and at my command, in my time for me. It's why I don't love to share these photographs once they are mine. ~ Barbie Q

Barbie book, photobook, barbies on travel, holiday, journey, box of photographs
Little Cicciolinas | Barbies Hitchcockian Journey To Italy

On the shelf, Barbies have noted Reinfried Marass' little photobook entitled 'Rope'. They boarded the holy box of photographs to discover the corresponding images, leaving the usual mess. Bad influence. Now, the gang wanna hitchhike to Italy to act as roadside killers like in Cicciolina's dark novela.

The last few days have felt longer than most, the sweltering heat only adding length to the road, but he can't recall a time when he was in a better company. The pedal to the metal and his companion looking most breathtaking, every mile adding to her intoxicating allure. Cicciolina hadn't much to say, quiet and mysterious, as all exquisite things are. She was happy to let him fill the voids between them, both with his words and his hands, reaching for her thigh, his eyes stealing glance after glance. The inevitable came to fruition late into the night of their Italian journey into the abyss. Pulling to the roadside, he slipped stealthily across the seat selling an infatuated boyish guise, fawning and pawing, whispering sweet nothings, his mouth descending and his grip intensifying. With tender kisses and sleight of hand, Cicciolina was free of his power before his first command. He, so distracted by her soundness that he fails to catch himself as he falls. He was likely in a drunken stupor by now, cursing her name, spewing a dangerous cocktail of venom and pain. Cicciolina hadn't even thought to feel a tinge of guilt, and try as she may, she could feel nothing but disdain for one with the cockiness to believe she could be tamed. How challenges of her will and tests of her body made her appear to be the weaker party, but actually mitigate his mastery without him even realizing it. For each time a woman bends without breaking, a man has left in awe; his heart a literary gold mine for the dark poetry he would write of her for the rest of his days. ~ Francesca

barbie movies, Rashomon, akira kurosawa, abstract, artsy
Rashomon | Everything Exists To End In A Photograph

Rashomoniade - Barbies recently have watched a bunch of Akira Kurosawa movie flicks. Later in the unlit moonless night, they fell in a cup of Sake. Not enough for seven Samurai girls, the gang wanna now redo Rashomon in their own, modernized, abstract and artsy Barbie way. And telling the truth!

I see it all through the lens of my camera - the flurry of movement, the venue girl staff in short dresses, giving orders to their heads. As I take it all in, my mind weighs the texture, the composition, the possibility of each changing scene, and I struggle to hold back, to keep my finger from pressing too soon. Click, click. With the Daguerreotype everyone was able to have their portrait taken, formerly it was only the prominent, and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same, so we shall only need one portrait. It is a cruel, ironical art. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down. It is all about secrets. The secrets we all have and will never tell. A photograph is a secret about a secret - the more it tells you, the less you know.

10001 Barbie
1000's & 1 Barbie | I've Been Through The Desert On A Camel With No Name

VERUSCHKA, the wounded poor, was taught by TIZIRI on how to ride CAMEL and now, as 'Ali Barbie', wanna conquer all the deserts and last frontiers on the globe. The rainbow-colored cord is Barbie's favorite string to fix and bind and pack all and everything; including themselves. New rolls will have to be ordered soon because insane, drunken CAMEL already has eaten up a spool. It eats one color only.

The three broke Barbies are 'Mistresses of insanity' sustained on the constant sipping of Courvoisier, adding to their craziness and making them as nutty as a fruitcake. A true Barbie doll's perspective brings storytelling photography alive. A Barbie is a Barbie is a Barbie - they are a reflection of what it is to be female. The good, the bad and the ugly. A doll's life journey, mostly with hidden metaphors, seen through the lens of puppeteer and photographer Reinfried Marass. 'Barbies are the makeup for photography' because, by nature, female characters are the most celebrated storytellers around. By letting them tell their story, Folies Barbie reflects the woman's honest and raw perspective. It is this grace that transcends and creates animation even in inanimate objects. In Folies Barbie's photographic work, analogies are used to add some fun and friction in a way that only dolls know how to do.