better times

The Photographer Who Makes Her Mother an Object of Desire

When she was in graduate school, the photographer Natalie Krick began taking pictures of women in what she calls “female drag.” She would meet her subjects on Web sites like Craigslist or Model Mayhem, go over to their houses, and give them ultra-feminine makeovers: bright lipstick, false nails and eyelashes, pushup bras. One day, her mother came to visit. “She’s a lot older than the women I was photographing, and I really liked that, because I was thinking a lot about idealized beauty, and the way that the body is sexualized and styled,” Krick said recently. Women over fifty don’t appear in ads in fashion magazines; women over fifty don’t really appear in ads, period, aside from ones for prescription medications and senior cruises. Krick wondered what it would be like to photograph her mother in the way of the younger women she was working with, dolled up as a glamorized object of desire.

It’s tricky to nail down exactly what makes someone feel like a “racial impostor.” For one Code Switch follower, it’s the feeling she gets from whipping out “broken but strangely colloquial Arabic” in front of other Middle Easterners.

For another — a white-passing, Native American woman — it’s being treated like “just another tourist” when she shows up at powwows. And one woman described watching her white, black and Korean-American toddler bump along to the new Kendrick and wondering, “Is this allowed?”

In this week’s podcast, we go deep into what we’re calling Racial Impostor Syndrome — the feeling, the science and a giant festival this weekend in Los Angeles that’s, in some ways, all about this.

‘Racial Impostor Syndrome’: Here Are Your Stories

Winona Ryder in Heathers (1988) Natalia Dyer in Stranger Things (2016)

There Is No Right Or Wrong