Grey Gardens is one of my all time favourite documentary films for many reasons. If you don’t know the film, take 3 hours and watch it now. The Maysles brothers allowed these two brilliantly vibrant women, Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, to tell their own story. Originally, the film was meant to be focused on Jackie Onassis and her sister Lee Radziwill. When directors (Albert and David Maysles) wanted to feature their aunt and first cousin (the Beales) instead the film’s funding was pulled, but the Maysles went on to make the film anyways.
There is a lot of commentary on this film to do with wealth, poverty, mental health, the “American Dream", and so on. I could talk about this film for hours, but I want this blog post to focus on the expression of self.
Photographers (myself included) will ask the folks they photograph to wear certain things, certain colours, neutral tones, no blacks and so on. These are helpful tips, but I want to encourage you to take a tip from Little Edie here too: wear what makes you feel good, because no matter what “you ought to be in pictures.”
Our culture is HYPER CRITICAL of what folks wear, what they put on their face, what ink they put on their bodies, what metal they pierce on their bodies and where they pierce it. We like to tell people what is an acceptable way to look, to act, to “appear” in public. One thing I hear a lot of is “Men don’t like girls who wear a lot of makeup.” We have internalized this message so much that women are also criticizing other women for wearing “too much” makeup, saying they are “trying too hard.” When I hear this type of conversation, I lose it a little.
Years ago, I had a partner who was frustrated with waiting for me to put makeup on in the morning and he said “I don’t understand why you have to do that, I don’t need you to wear that stuff.” This bothered me at the time, but I was barely 20 and I didn’t have a lot of confidence to stand up for the things I liked when they were questioned. I relayed this to a mentor/teacher I had at the time and she quoted Grey Gardens. She encouraged me to embrace my “costume of the day” if it made me feel good.
I want to live in a world where every woman, man, non-binary person knows: if you wear makeup and it makes you feel good then you get to keep wearing makeup. I have never worn makeup for another person. I wear it as armour, I wear it to be creative, I wear it to accent features I like on my face, I wear it because it make ME feel fly. This is not such a simple thing for a lot of men, trans, or two spirit folks who wear makeup. The world is a dangerous place for them to have the freedom of that expression.
Grey Gardens stands out to me in so many ways, but one of the main ones being: these are two women the world was ready to forget about. They didn’t fit the expectations of the wealthy world they were born into and so that world cast them aside. The Maysles (along with their co-directors/editors: Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer) saw something in their story and took the time (real time, like hours and hours and hours of footage and audio) to create a narrative that did not criticize the women, but celebrated them.
I want to acknowledge how hard it is in our culture to express yourself through your appearance if it does not fit the norm. I want to really acknowledge how dangerous it is for some folks to have the freedom to wear their costume of the day.
If I ever have the privilege to take your picture, please always be whatever version of yourself you are feeling that day because all versions of you “ought to be in pictures.”
Here is some inspiration from Little Edie Herself: