REMINDER: Submit to the A+ Member 🎃 Autumnal Photo Gallery 🎃

a collage showing Anya, a white woman with long brown-blonde hair smiling in an orchard and balancing an apple on her head, Kayla a South Asian woman with glasses and long brown hair smilign with a jack o lantern she carved that says gay with her partner Kristen in the background, a white butch human with long brown hair that is holding up a jack o lantern that is smiling, then there is a photo of viv with their sisters and family dog and they are all asian humans, sitting outside in fall weather, and finally, there is a photo of nico and their partner sadie outside of gertrude stein's birth home in the autumn. nico, a white human with bleached hair wearing fall clothes and a beanie is kissing the head of their partner, sadie, a white gender non conforming woman wearing a beanie and coat. they are both wearing glasses.

Anya in an apple orchard, Kayla and Kristen carving pumpkins, Viv with their sisters and family dog, Nico and Sadie in front of Gertrude Stein’s childhood home.

OKAY YES IT IS TIME!!!

SEND IN YOUR FALL PHOTOS, of you, at any time that is autumn for you, from any year (just a photo you love) for the A+ autumnal photo gallery. If I don’t get enough of these photos we cannot have a gallery, which is tragic. So, we need YOU! The Autostraddle team have bravely volunteered some photos of our own to inspire you. As you see, you can be doing something perhaps characteristically autumnal such as carving pumpkins, or simply existing outside with your dog. You do you!

When I first wrote this call, not 24 hours had passed since the official autumn equinox, and what that means is that all those sweet summer children can go scurrying back behind their sunglasses and to the darkest edges of the public pool because now is the time of hauntings and crunching leaves, steaming drinks and the flap of bats’ wings. Summer’s over, witches! It’s time for fall!!!

What we want is to revel in this season with you, for you to show us your most scrumptious sweaters, your favorite pumpkin vice, your family decked out in costumes, you and your friends eating honey and apples and sharing the season’s bounty with each other. Listen, you all, I grow vegetables, so I know that some of my greatest moments of the season have yet to even come. I have yet to pick all my corn, my winter squashes. Death and life-giving sustenance walk hand-in-hand this time of year!

SPEAKING of life-giving sustenance, you all sustain us. You are the beating heart of this community, and right now, we want to see you and have you be seen (if you wanna! if not, that is also cool!).

So, this is a call for submissions to our A+ Fall Photo Gallery. The qualifications are simple: whatever you want to share, a photo of you, a photo of you and loved ones, so long as everyone consents, it’s all good. These will go up behind A+, too, in case that is helpful to know.

Alt Text Announcement!

HELLO!! I am asking for your help with accessibility efforts, so I want to be sure to highlight this because it’s really important that everyone does their part! In the form, I will ask you to include ALT TEXT for your photo. This is NOT OPTIONAL and you literally cannot submit a photo without it. Alt text or “alternative text” is used by people who use screen readers (and others who need more info than the photo itself) to access info about a photo. While it is standard at Autostraddle to include alt text,  I (Nico) would rather not guess at how you identify or like to be described based on just a photo (or honestly, sometimes, I would rather not guess at what is going on!! Please do not make me guess about very crucial details such as your particular costume or what exactly your relationship is to others in the photo!), so I appreciate your help in providing descriptions for yourself and others.

Here is a photo we will use as an example:

Nico is a white genderqueer human with short, bleached blonde hair and tattoos who is seen here holding a hubbard squash from their garden and smiling broadly. They are wearing glasses and a black tee shirt and a head lamp on their forehead and are in front of a curio cabinet inside their home. It appears to be night.

For example, typically, a photo of me like the above might have alt text like “Nico is a white genderqueer human with short, bleached blonde hair and tattoos who is seen here holding a hubbard squash from their garden and smiling broadly. They are wearing glasses and a black tee shirt and a head lamp on their forehead and are in front of a curio cabinet inside their home. It appears to be night.” This provides info about who I am, what I’m doing, how I feel and the mood of the image, and also the context of my actions. Essentially, with alt text, you want anyone to be able to understand the photo, so anything necessary to understand you or the context should be included. With alt text and THIS particular project, you can feel like MORE IS MORE. If it’s too much, I’ll just edit it, so it’s better to err on including more than it is on including less. Thank you for providing alt text!

OKAY SO here is the form! Send in those pics! JPG, JPEG and PNG are highly preferred formats! You can send me an HEIC but also a fairy loses one of its wings when you do that so do you really want that? That’s brutal. Geeze. Get these in by Monday,  October 17th!

FAQ:

How sexy can we get?

We can’t show nipples, genitalia, or simulated or actual sex. Sex toys or nude art are totally permitted. So, like, look hot, but if you must be nude, have a cleverly placed gourd or several.

Do I need photo consent from everyone in the image?

YES! Absolutely. By submitting to this gallery you affirm completely and totally that you have obtained complete and total and legal consent to publish all of these images and that you are also giving Autostraddle permission to publish them without indemnity. If there are kids or underage (under 18) people in these photos, they have to be your kids or under your guardianship or otherwise such that you can legally give consent for the photo to be published on behalf of them.

What qualifies as autumn? Maybe it’s actually spring where I am?

Literally, embracing the season where YOU are in September / October 2022. That’s what we want to see!

When will these be published?

End of October. It’ll be great!

When do you need submissions in by?

By Monday, October 17th!

🎃🎃🎃HERE IS THE FORM YOU GAYNGELS!!!🎃🎃🎃

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Nico

Nico Hall is a Team Writer for Autostraddle (formerly Autostraddle's A+ and Fundraising Director and For Them's Membership and Editorial Ops person.) They write nonfiction both creative — and the more straightforward variety, too, as well as fiction. They are currently at work on a secret longform project. Nico is also haunted. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram. Here's their website, too.

Nico has written 238 articles for us.

18 Comments

  2. thank you for the alt text announcement! i’ve been training ppl on writing image descriptions for social media posts and have gotten some truly uh. not good examples so it’s lovely to see a well-written one!

  3. Thank you so much for including the alt text announcement and example, as someone who relies on alt text it means so much to see you always prioritising it!

  5. Very excited to take a nude for this with a strategically placed pumpkin or several. Possibly even more excited to write the alt text for it. Thanks for making this nightmare a reality, Nico!

  6. can i use this oppty to share about a QUEEEEEEER food forest community effort that’s super amazing by including a link to the webpage for the project in the description? or is that kind of promo beyond the scope of this photo gallery?

  7. Done! Thanks for the reminder.

    Decided to just go with something already on my phone and what do you know? I already had a selfie of me wearing my favorite flannel shirt taken last month.

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