Photographers have learned to be inventive in evading Instagram’s ban on female nipples. They’ve used paint, glitter, hair and flower petals to obscure them. They’ve covered them up with leaves, cornstarch, a spatula, handbags, shot glasses, strands of bubble gum, and sand.
Some have inserted a rectangular black censorship bar. Others have used digital editing tools to blur the nipples or overlay a patch of the model’s skin color to give the impression that she has no nipples at all.
These artistic gymnastics are the result of Instagram’s community guidelines, which allow female nipples in paintings and sculptures, but not typically in photography. And they are related to a campaign — #Freethenipple — being waged by artists, activists and celebrities, and playing out on the social media platform itself.
But to many hunters, that connection to an ecosystem is the point. Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, after all, isn’t a food organization. It’s a conservation group, a growing advocacy arm of the sportsmen and sportswomen’s community driven by a politically diverse membership — largely young people — passionate about public lands and wildlife. The connection between hunting and advocacy might not seem immediately clear, but in much of the United States, hunting hinges on access to public lands, as well as functioning ecosystems and healthy wildlife populations. Many sportsmen and sportswomen will speak readily about the personal connection — sometimes even identification — that they feel with the animals they hunt.
It’s no accident, then, that food is so central to Rendezvous, and the restaurant-level quality of the dishes on hand reflects a shared respect for food as “the most long-held spiritual connection to wild places,” in the words of BHA board chair Ryan Busse.
“There isn’t a dinner on the planet, regardless of price, that has any more authenticity and labor involved,” Busse says of the Rendezvous cook-off. The event is particularly fun “for a lot of us who grew up thinking and being told that wild game, a pheasant you shot, was a compromised food,” he adds. “It’s good. It’s exquisite. It’s not a compromise.”
A ramshackle throwback to a funkier, more literary time, the store has shelves handmade from raw lumber. And its customers and clerks are often just as eccentric as the shelves.
Paul Hendrickson, whose previous book was a study of another oversize American figure, Ernest Hemingway, is riveted by what he calls Wright’s “life of Old Testament disaster and disarray”, and has written not a biography but a “biographical portrait”. While Wright extolled the “definitely decorative value of the plain surface”, Hendrickson’s proclivities are for the baroque. This is the most mannered book you are likely to read: self-referential, full of what-a-clever-boy-am-I writing, spattered with show-off phrase-making, and achingly self-aware.