“No Country For Old Pervs”
By There’s a lot of great stuff in this Molly Lambert longread. In response to a disgracefully whitewashy New York feature on Terry Richardson:
Whatever your opinion is of Richardson’s brightly exposed white-wall portraits, sometimes explicit personal work, and provocative fashion photography should be irrelevant to the question of whether he should continue to be hired. If Richardson touches and molests models without their consent, as multiple accounts accounts in specific, extremely similar detail allege, there’s no excuse for his ongoing high status in the photography world. Richardson never flat-out denies the allegations in the profile, but he evades taking responsibility and shrugs off any collateral damage. It’s all just part and parcel of the artistic process for Uncle Terry, apparently! He claims ignorance about the sexual politics of his photography and accompanying feminist backlash, but also cannily made a beeline at a birthday party to take an already infamous picture with Gloria Steinem. The profile mostly contains old information, other than Richardson’s taste-damning admission that he loves the Seth MacFarlane movie Ted.
The New York profile’s positive spin on Terryworld is what prompted Anna del Gaizo to come forward. In her Jezebel piece, del Gaizo wrote: “I’m not talking about this now because it’s something that has necessarily been gnawing at me for the past six years, but what does bother me is the fact that this man, who has announced with his actions that his desires, fantasies, and yes, his raging boner are more important than another human being’s state of mind or consequential distress, continues to be revered, hired, and supported by celebrities, professionals, and publications alike.”
On the deposed leader of American Apparel:
But it’s fully possible that the turn in the company’s fortunes had less to do with people tiring of the Last Night’s Party vibe and more to do with the low quality of the high-priced clothes, even though high pricing is ostensibly what helps pay the factory workers a fair wage. American Apparel’s board members didn’t fire Dov Charney because they suddenly realized he was a creep. They have known the whole time, and apparently didn’t care enough to oust him. But American Apparel hasn’t seen a profit since the end of the 2000s. The board may have fired him now only so the company wouldn’t get delisted from the New York Stock Exchange.
Plenty more where that came from; read the whole etc.