Zvaal – Nettie Harris, Philadelphia, PA (2011)

As someone who believes that whenever possible you should strive to present bodies in context, I very much appreciate Zvaal’s respect for the women with whom he makes pictures.

Like if you want to know when and how to employ the frame edges to crop out part of someone’s body without it being disrespectful or objectifying, you could do much worse than studying Zvaal’s work.

I’m much less fond of his use of vertical orientation. I don’t think I can successfully make a case that his work is #skinnyframebullshit; however, I do strenuously object to like 85% of his use of it. In other words: I won’t argue that it serves a logical compositional purpose but the use more often than not undermines the conceptual vivacity of the work.

I’m primarily posting this because there’s been a dearth of B&W images lately. (If you haven’t noticed I’m super OCD about alternating B&W and color images.) And counter-intuitively, I think the black pinstripe on white sheets are a fascinating texture in monochrome–look at how the sheets almost look white in places where there’s overexposure but how prominent the pin stripes are otherwise.

(Also: Nettie was the first Tumblr model I followed.)