Stella Kramer

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Category, Stellazine | The Zine

Topsy Turvy by Qiana Mestrich

Posted on April 14th, 2022

Topsy Turvy Zine Cover

Topsy Turvy is a subset of The Black Doll series by Qiana Mestrich that appropriates original imagery of vintage black dolls for sale on Etsy and Ebay.

This new series is inspired by the “topsy turvy” cloth dolls, invented and handmade in the late 1800s by enslaved African-American women. Two-headed and reversible, one side of the doll was a Black girl child, while the other side was a White girl child. Both were sewn together where the hips and legs would be, with a long skirt designed to hide one doll while the other was held upright.

While their purpose is still misunderstood, it is believed that topsy-turvy dolls were made for enslaved children and perhaps also intended as “maid dolls” for the slave master’s children. The legacy of these racialized dolls continued long after abolition and their flip design was mimicked during the shift from craft production to mass-produced toys.

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Where Furrows Run Deep by Jeffrey Sauger

Posted on August 12th, 2021

Cover of zine Where Furrows Run Deep by Jeffrey Sauger

Agriculture was a part of the essence of Black middle class life, and with a loss of 90% of their land came a loss of generational wealth. In 2017, according to the USDA, only about 49,000 farmers out of 3.4 million across the country were Black. A century ago there were nearly one million Black farmers.

Jeffrey Sauger photographed these farms in 2001 in Ohio, Virginia, North and South Carolina.

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Still Life by Giovanni Savino

Posted on September 15th, 2020

This is the first issue of Stellazine in the 21st Century.

No coronavirus. No quarantine or isolation. This is timeless; photography that isn’t tied to anything but itself, the photographer and the viewer.

Giovanni Savino inhabits his photography. Throughout his career he has searched for something deep inside every time he raises his camera. Take a look.

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