Paul Freeman – Adam Rexx from Outback Dusk (2015)

The technique employed here is nice–the waning golden hour light kissing everything with just enough light to limit highlights to the sky and making Rexx’s body push forward from the mid-ground ever so slightly. (If pushed I’d bet that some contrast was added back in during post and the black point was massaged a little.)

The limited available light imposes a truncated depth of field–I’d say about four feet from just in front of the foreground in the lower part of the frame; and the focus starts to go soft just beyond the back right edge of the armchair. (Providing some cine-style bokeh on the bushes, fence and mountains in the distance–which further emphasizes his body.

I do have two small criticisms:

The position of his legs is a little too obviously cheating his package so as to provide maximum visibility to the camera. The angle of his head and the several profile clashes with the rest of the body language.

Still, for those small objections, there is something to say about how this is an image fixated on the sexual potentiality of the nude male body–anchoring it in this setting muddles the conceptual underpinnings somewhat, because while the emphasis is the flaccid cock, there’s the presentation of the body anchored and clearly contextualized in space. (The opposite would be something like this where the image reads as a picture of a beautiful erect dick that also happens to be connected to a boy who is essentially extraneous to the image’s purpose.)

The chair sitting angled so perfectly on the shattered bricks is, yes: overly coy. The boots and hat add some kitschy fetish viability but also contribute to a sense of barely constrained awkwardness.

This is actually one of those images where I think perhaps making the sexual potentiality more explicit might have helped the image substantially. The thing about watching people fuck either themselves/someone else or multiple other parties is that while yes, it’s a crutch to use people fucking as a narrative crutch, there’s a degree of universality to the urge to get it on that’s so strong, waiting until a more appropriate moment isn’t an option.

Like with this image, if Rexx had a trail of semen on his abs and chest, the awkward bits of the image would be diminished to the point of insignificance–because the viewer will believe that he’s masturbated and in the moments after is worried if anyone has approached and he hasn’t heard them due to his breathless ecstasy.