Oleksandr Pankovets – Untitled from Meadow Nymphs series (20XX)

There’s something at once intolerably pretentious and vaguely creepy about Pankovets’ work.

He claims Edward Weston as an influence. Um, just no. It’s obvious you have no idea what you’re talking about of you’re relocating mission control from your brain to you ass.

As far as the creepy you can flip through his images and note his MO of using genitals to essentialize his subjects. And even I’ll admit that it’s not as straightforward as all that but notice the way he’s always like sorry-not-sorry-I-am-totally-staring-at-your-junk in this image and also this image for which he’s likely gotten the most Tumblr traction.

And although there’s an effing laundry list of reasons the above images don’t work–just picking w at random: 1.) they’re total #skinnyframebullshit, i.e. when tracking lateral motion vertical orientation isolates the movement in space instead of inviting the potential for it to logically stretch across the frame following the trajectory of the subject; 2.) even given the diptych presentation, were you are supposed to see two comic book panels with an implied ellipsis between them, the actions here would be seen as reversed due to the tendency of the Western eye to scan both images and text from left to right. [As a note: if he would have swapped the images and flipped both left to right… the would read as a diptych where the figure is running and further the odd incomplete auto-focus would actually read as a sensible addition.]

The reason I like these in spite of their failings, is because they represent an honest representation of the unrefined and quite frankly sloppy technical chops of the image maker. The set, setting and motion blur were truly solid ideas–that in a horizontal frame, given a little bit of manual focus dexterity would have produced a breathtaking image.