An exclusive look at the photos that inspired the short film "In Real Life."
I could try to explain the inspiration behind Claire Kurylowski's short film "In Real Life," speculate on her thought-process and how she arrived at this visually-gripping portrayal of how modern women deal with and protect themselves against sexual harassment. Or I could show you the never-before-seen photo series titled "girl hold," born from a shoot Claire did that eventually grew into her film, and let her explain her vision for herself. I'll save you the secondhand analysis and let you hear it straight from the source:
From our interview with Claire Kurylowski:
"I did a photo shoot a few months before the film’s conception with Arvida and a friend of ours with the pink rope and some very stripped down lighting set-ups--flashlights, red bulbs--I was playing around with what could obfuscate, subvert and girl-codify these images of rope play with the female characters portrayed. I was attempting some re-imagining of normative scopic regimes of women in intimate, playful scenes. I aimed to make these images feel like quotidian, less mediated looking moments as opposed to setting them up as deviant or hardcore--with this kind of story in mind that maybe they just found a YouTube video and wanted to try it out. I guess it also has the voyeuristic tastes of a queer female audience considered and I wanted to make images that felt non cis-male authored. The aspect of the girl-coded portrait that came out of the shoot gained traction as I developed the idea for the film, this image juxtaposed in opposition to what the "How to Break Out of Zip Ties" video stands for."
Written by Molly Morris