buffer-overrun

I just realized (after years of having the picture stapled to my wall, followed by even more years of having it in a box of random magazine clippings) that this is Nikki Uberti, photographed by Terry Richardson.  I not a big fan of Terry Richardson, as a person or as a photographer, but I really like his pictures of Nikki (his then wife).  Instead of being creepy-porny with terrible lighting, they seem intimate.  Instead of making Nikki look trashy, he makes her seem compelling.

I think I found this picture in 1997, around the time Michael and I moved in together (after I’d been kicked out of my old apartment because Michael was too loud and smoked too much).  I was always doing something crazy with my eyebrows – plucking them out entirely or just plucking them thin enough that I could draw them in with a burgundy lip pencil – so I loved the idea of a picture of a model shaving her eyebrows.  She also looked so tore-up and fucked-up that I felt like the picture reflected my life a little too well.  Michael hated the picture – he hated 90s heroin chic and grunge, and dirty realism and any kind of retro-70s stuff.  Even though he was (like me) 23, he was holding onto 80s goth with all his might.  He hated to see women looking scruffy and trashy (which was pretty ironic, since he was homeless before I took him in).  He was horrified by my shaggy hair and my crazy-girl Edie Sedwick eyeliner, and said that when he first met me, he thought I was the sloppiest drag queen he’d ever seen.