Fatale Femmes

The photographs don’t try to seduce you. They just exist—bodies and dirt and light filtered through red glasses, everything shot with clarity and no apology. Petra Collins and Laura-Lynn Petrick work under Fatale Femmes and their images have this directness to them that comes from not caring much about what anyone thinks.

There’s something almost quaint about the panic institutions have over imagery. A photograph of a kid in a bathing suit can get someone arrested. A nipple on television gets blurred out of existence. But the actual culture of image-making—the photographers, the artists making things—operates on completely different rules. They decided long ago that the approval machinery didn’t apply to them. Collins and Petrick are part of that world. Their work is proof that you don’t need permission to make something real.

The Fatale Femmes project is crude and sexual and playful in ways that would never survive traditional scrutiny. Breasts and dirt and inverted crosses. They exist in pockets of visual culture that most people don’t even know are there—writing for Rebelle Zine, maintaining presence at Garbage Museum, showing up on Lookbook. It’s the kind of work you find by accident and think, okay, at least this exists. At least someone is still making this.

As a maker, I think about their approach sometimes—the moment where you have to decide whether you’re making something for approval or whether it needs to exist regardless. Seems like they figured that out a while ago.