Sorry about missing the Reread yesterday. Today’s photo will kind of double for my usual Reread content.
Cosplay photos at conventions are a big deal—you see a bunch of photographers who specialize in cosplay posing corralling some of the many of the folks wearing astonishingly good and imaginative outfits. The results are often fantastic, but I also find them a bit sterile in some cases when I see them posted—very controlled, very staged. (With women cosplayers, they also often follow the norms of conventional fashion and portraiture photography.) I’ve often joined in shooting people who are posing, though the interior light in hotels is sometimes pretty iffy, and over the years I’ve gotten some nice shots, but the primary creative force involved are the cosplayers themselves. Many of them aren’t just good at making outfits but at imaginative and stylized posing that reflects their character.
I also do like taking candids of cosplayers, but it’s a trickier business even than standard street photography. There’s a pretty strong understanding—sometimes an explicit posted code—that you should ask people to pose and refrain from photos otherwise. I get it—it’s especially oriented towards protecting women wearing revealing costumes from photographic harassment. So I try to be very careful about the kind of convention candids I take and keep. Folks travelling, resting, in crowds, from a distance, seem fairly safe and you get some fun (and funny shots). Mostly I think of it as following the same personal rules as street photography and candids generally: nothing that would embarrass or humiliate the person in the picture, nothing intimate.
I went to a science-fiction convention for the first time when I was a young teenager, and it was a mixed experience for me. The “big event” was William Shatner sing-songing about whalesong and how talking about how amazing whales were and it was just as painful as that sounds. (This was well before Star Trek IV was made.) It was great to see all the vendors and there were a lot of movies like Forbidden Planet showing all the time in small rooms, which was cool. There was a small coterie of attendees doing some kind of elaborate LARP-style game based on Logan’s Run where some players were “runners” and one person was a Sandman with a fake gun trying to get them all, and I remember the convention organizers eventually announcing that it had to stop because the convention hall security was freaking out about it.
But if you’d shown me then what cosplayers today look like, I would have flatly disbelieved that such a thing would ever be possible. Most cosplayers now look better than costumes in movies like Star Wars and about a thousand times better than the schlockier makeup jobs you might once have seen in a Grade Z SF film like Laserblast. I remember Starlog slobbering all over Laserblast despite Star Wars having appeared the summer before: the notion that science fiction was going to become a predominant genre of well-made major summer blockbuster films hadn’t settled in to the consciousness of SF readers yet.