Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Flora & Fauna (2016)

Any one making an artsy image of someone pissing is firmly standing in Emmet Gowin’s formidable shadow. (Especially when it’s a B&W image like above.)

I’m referring specifically to one of my favorite ever photographs that Gowin made of his wife Edith peeing in the open doorway of a ramshackle shed.

There was an article in The New Yorker several weeks back about this photograph that’s more than worth the two minutes it takes to read.

I’m not willing to place the above image on even close to the same level as Gowin’s photo of Edith. But the article winds down with a sort of lamentation on the fate of depictions of intimacy in our current mass culture of oversharing:

I wonder, sometimes, about the fate of this kind of photographic
intimacy in the age of Instagram, when users are encouraged to share the
granular details of their lived experience, their most nominally
intimate moments, but on a platform governed by likes and clicks.

To me, the above image may function in the fashion described but despite some pretty gnarly technical flaws (#skinnyframebullshit being a huge one), there is something carefree and playful about it that turns what might otherwise be a salacious image, into something much more matter-of-fact.

It’s also worth mentioning that the model in this image is doing some crazy great work. I’ve never seen anything quite like this amazing image of her by stef-des.