PRIVILEGE: a story past

Photography and Styling: Mikaela Martinez
Makeup and Hair: Lauren Hendrix
Model: Morgan Michaels

Mikaela Martinez, your vision takes me back to the cultural construct of the 1950's and deep into the following decade when white American women enjoyed a contradiction of privilege. On one hand they were at the height of social respectability. Black Americans were terrified and envious of her. Black women copied her, and despised the  inner workings of the relationship between them that developed among wealthier white women who could and did hire Black women to care for their children. White women lived in a dichotomy that could, and did end the lives of Colored men, and Black women developed ways of raising their sons meant to center and steer their sons from the hanging tree.

On the other hand sitting aloof on a pedestal of their men's design white women could not express themselves as they do today. Their money was their husband's. They could not, like every other woman, get credit, and they did not own their bodies, or use their voices publicly to the extend they can today. White women, in those days, pranced when they were on city streets. They seemed to balance contradictions fearfully, or with disdain in their eyes reserved for the 'unwashed' seemed to enjoy their status, as white women, based upon a system of apartheid tenuously held together by fears and dread. It was a strange way to hold a beauty standard copied by women throughout the Western world, and to the extent it could in other countries struggling for survival or independence from Western influence, and dominance. - Gregory E. Woods

Photography and Styling: Mikaela Martinez
Makeup and Hair: Lauren Hendrix
Model: Morgan Michaels

[To the model Morgan Michaels] "Your presence in Mikaela's portfolio is impressive. Being the focus of the lens created a stir of recollections for me about events in the US before you were born, and the interplay between then and now...


You exuded a maturity and have a command of self that is appealing to the eye. It draws the viewer back to the photo to earnestly discover who  you are, and the photographer, Mikaela Martinez, developed a concept centered around you that was compelling and demanding in an easy sort of way. Anyway, I suspect you will live deeply asking the right questions every step of your life. I enjoy the journey of the short portfolio." - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8.22.12