Miloš Burkhardt – Title Unknown (XXXX)

You know how a movie that is just plain bad is somehow always better than a film that squandered such great potential?

That’s how I feel about Burkhardt’s work–he images have potential but almost always come off as dull in their staid repetition of the female nude as a landscape within a landscape conceit.

The above is an exception. So much so, in fact, that I question Burkhardt’s editing eye–this flatly doesn’t belong anywhere near the photos with which it has been surreptitiously grouped.

Note the subtle shadow-to-highlight gradation between foreground and background sand. With the exception of her left elbow, the image is compressed to mid-tones/shadow ranges; accentuating the curving line of her back flowing into her neck and dark cascading hair. The line of her right leg jagging the eye rightward, following the angle of her thigh

Her contorted pose reframes her face and pubis within the larger composition–the focus is definitely sharper on her face.

I love the way the one strand of her hair is straggles along the back of her neck toward her throat. And I can’t really justify it but something about the position of her hands brings to mind both Gabriel Orozco’s My Hands Are My Heart and Pina Bausch’s brilliant choreography for Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps.