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'You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of 'serious lesions' or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.” -- Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (the quote on the photograph comes from the same source.) -=- Our Daily Challenge: Feminine -=- the geek behind the curtain: i started out on google this afternoon without even a specific challenge in mind. did a search for 'mythology revolution quotes', just curious about what would come up and hoping to find something inspiring by Joseph Campbell or Alexander Eliot. Naomi's name was on the first page of hits, and i immediately got drawn into her writing and her liberating way of thinking. from there i picked a challenge, then started going through recent photos. sometimes a backwards approach to a challenge is a little revolution all on its own. as for the processing here its fairly straight forward, 10 minutes work .. cropped square, retaining the entire width of the original (as i usually prefer to do). the DoF here is entirely artificial .. i selected around E and K, then applied 'gaussian blur', shrank the selection by 100 pixels and did 'gaussian blur' again. a quick 'auto contrast/auto levels/auto color' correction in photoshop -- which i usually forget to do (this is the second time i've remembered ever?). i meant to 'unsharp mask' E & K but forgot.

Greek mythology art pieces from the Louve in Singapore Singapore National Museum