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Allaire Bartel
Allaire Bartel is an American photographer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her main work surrounds topics like gender boundaries and body image. She is known for her photo project series titled ‘Boundaries.’ The project is a bold commentary on sexuality and captures what it’s like to experience male entitlement from a female perspective.

About the Project
‘Boundaries’ is a photo series that Bartel produced while she was a participant of the Young Photographers Alliance 2014 mentoring program. In this series there is an average young professional woman who is depicted in everyday situations. However, the images boldly express how men intrude upon her everyday privacy and modesty. In her series, there are evident depictions of male arms and hands performing a variety of actions that are overwhelmingly intrusive on the subject’s body that represent the concept of male entitlement. The five photos in the series are titled:


 * The Office
 * The Kitchen
 * The Street Scene
 * The Bar
 * The Yoga Studio

Inspirations
Bartel’s initial ideas sparked from the backlash of online discussion of rape culture, everyday sexism and domestic violence that surrounded the 2014 Isla Villa Killings in Santa Barbara, California. According to Bartel, people see issues around sexual abuse as small individual isolate incidents but she wanted to show how oppression of women is present in everyday daily life, and not just confined to more outright incidents like rape or abuse. Her project was a depiction of her own and her model’s personal experiences.

Unexpected Media Coverage
On September 12th, 2014 Bartel displayed her photos in an exposition at MissLPhotography in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Since then, Bartel’s project was posted on her online portfolio website (insert link) receiving a lot of major online coverage and gaining a lot of exposure from popular news websites like Buzzfeed, Elite-Daily, HuffPost Canada, Cosmopolitan UK, Al Jazeera, City Free Press and more. Due to so much unexpected media coverage, Bartel decided she would use this project to do some good for her community and those affected by the subject of the project. She selling her photos as prints and raising funds to donate to the Women’s Center & Shelter of Greater Pittsburgh.