hello! I figure that it is only fair that I do the homework too this week seeing as how SG has changed my life completely, in ways that I could never have imagined. I am writing this from backstage at the burlesque tour in Adelaide Australia. Where the girls are performing to crowds full of people half way around the world and I feel grateful to be traveling with all of them and meeting so many great people. It is hard to sum up 12 years in a single post but I will try. I suppose the best place to start is the beginning. In 2001 my life was a bit of a mess in all honesty. I had just left a soul crushing job. The first in my admittedly short career where I wasn't respected because off my sex, or maybe my age (23), or my pink hair or the cut of my jib, whatever the case it left me questioning my career path. I decided that I was going to leave LA and head back up to Portland (my hometown) to finish school for photography and recharge. I packed up all of my belongings and headed up that summer on a road trip. I stopped in SF to visit a friend and she and I stumbled one afternoon into a bookstore that had tons of vintage magazines. I found all of these old playboys and pin-up pictures. The women featured in the magazines looked like they are having fun and were beautiful and not self conscious of their lovely curves. It was a bit of a revolutionary concept to me to be proud of your body, especially your nude body and to not be ashamed of your body or your sexuality.
I continued on my trip up to Portland and began to get settled that summer. The plan was to hang out and just relax before school started that fall but relaxing is not my strong suit. I met my new neighbor @rose and started hanging out with her and one day asked her to do a photo shoot inspired by my growing vintage pin-up collection. She came over one afternoon with a garbage bag full of fairy wings and tutus and electrical tape. We had a fun afternoon shooting nudes and laughing a lot. The results were beautiful and her personality really came through. Her confidence in her body was inspiring. I asked a friend I had known for years @mary if she would shoot with me and she surprisingly agreed. When I saw the photos we shot I knew that I was on to something. I started shooting more girls not clear as to what to do with the pictures.
I had coffee with a friend that I had know for years and worked with in the past @sean. He had just finished a freelance gig that had left him a bit disillusioned and we were commiserating about what we were going to do next with our lives. I showed him my photos and we were discussing what I should do with them when he suggested we build a community around the women in my photos. We both agreed they had so much more to share with the world than just their images and wanted to create a platform where they could share their thoughts and feelings with the world. We had both worked in the web for the bulk of our careers and appreciated the way that it could bring people together.
a
aaWe were inspired to do something that we loved. We didn't know if people would be into what we were doing but we hoped that people in Portland and maybe Seattle would appreciate it. So we started working to build SuicideGirls. We chose the name because the girls who we thought were the most beautiful women in the world had committed "social suicide" by choosing not to fit in. That and the term "alternative" sucks :) We just wanted to create something that we would use and hopefully other people would too. We had both spent most of our careers in the web and had seen well funded ideas fail and experienced the excesses of the dot com world. We didn't need any of that we just wanted to make something we loved. It turns out other people were as inspired by the brave, amazing, interesting OGSG's as I was. I will be forever grateful to the beautiful women who shared their souls with the world through SuicideGirls. @rose, @mary, @debrajean, @anais, @voltaire and all the other OGSG's who helped to shape the site. It has been an incredibly profound experience to be able to do what I love for a living and to meet so many incredible women. I feel truly lucky and grateful for the love, support and life this community has given me. It is a rare experience to be inspired everyday that you go to work. I have no words big enough to share the amount of thanks I have for that. I am even more thankful to the community and all of the members who support the ideas of the site and allow me to be able to help other women do what they love for a living and inspire others. Incredibly inspiring artists like @alissa and @cherry and @sawa and @courtneyriot and @sunshine and @albertine and @waikiki @gossip @lavonne @lavazzaro @dwam @anemona @talamia and @talena @pulse and @milloux and @manko and so so many others over the past 12 years and I feel remiss for not mentioning.
Being able to work with such inspirational women has truly changed who I am.@rambo a@sash have taught me so much about true friendship and shown me how good people can be while inspiring me to be better for which I will be forever in their debt for. And so many others who I am not able to tag at this moment.
There have been so so many women that I feel truly blessed to know and have shown me through their friendship in the past 12 years that there is no way I could begin to tag them all but you know who you are.
It hasn't always been love songs and kisses but at the end of the day I am grateful for everyone who I have met through the site and all of the experience taught me so much about myself and has helped me to be the person I am today.
The women on this site inspire me daily with their courage, intelligence and beauty. They teach me to trust myself, feel comfortable and content with my body, my sexuality and my life. They also inspire me to be better and do more and be half as awesome as they are. Thank you so much. Truly.
