Girl in Photography Class Who You Thought Was Cool Shows Pictures from Her Fall Break: Actually Upper-Middle Class and Suburban
Photo from Pixabay with edits / CC0
October 29, 2023 at 3:30 pm
You sit down in Photography 1000: Landscapes and Also Trees, and the girl next to you is wearing a striped sweater (she tells you it’s from ‘Ganni.’ Sounds nice, but you’ve never heard of it), blue jeans and a ton of silver rings with coloured rocks on them. Her hair is long and unkempt.
She stands up. Beat up Doc Martens. Wow. She’s cool. You don’t see her again until after fall break.
“Hey, where have you been?” You smile coyly. She bats an eyelash and opens her portfolio.
“Scarsdale Train Station,” you read. Scaaaarsdale. Scarsdalé. Dalé! Like Pitbull! Wow. That’s worldly.
The next picture is of a suburban McMansion. “Ah, that’s probably like… the other side of the tracks right… the other part of town… those rich bastar-” She cuts you off and promptly tells you that it’s her childhood home. Her parents recently relocated to Aspen and she misses that house. She took a picture because she wanted to frame it for her apartment…in Domus. Your head jolts. You hear a clank. Oh, she has two thick Hermés bracelets stacked on her wrist. Odd, you’d never quite realized that.
You continue to flip through her photographs.
Ah, a picture of a man barbequing. “Oh is that like your super conservative American-family-values uncle that you hate because he represents everything that you are against?” It was her dad. Who she loved. She added she was surprised you didn’t recognize him because there was a painting of him inside the building you were in, under a plaque that says “BIGGEST DONOR TO THIS BUILDING:” Weird, you must have…missed that.
“Your photography is amazing, you’re majoring in this, right?”
No, she’s a PPE major and is doing this to fulfill her ‘Physical World Requirement’ because of the landscapes and also the trees.
Thus, let this harrowing tale serve as a warning! As we transition into boot-wearing weather, be aware: just because they are wearing Doc Martens, does not mean that they are alternative.