Bettina Rheims – MC6 II from Morceaux choisis series (2001)

I’m not especially familiar with Rheims work but from what I’ve seen of it, she seems to meet her subjects halfway.

What I mean by that is not something I know how to easily indicate. It’s kind of like this: most photographers/image makers operate with a reliable fixation on appearance as factual representation. In other words: they trade in the ontology of I can see this and I can show you this, so this must be ‘real’.

There’s a lot made of Rheims and her use of color in concert with insanely high quality printing to “[make] the flesh appears living and [contribute] a disconcerting realism.”

I don’t disagree with that summation. It’s more that I think the way Rheims uses her erotics as a mode of unsettling the viewer serves to create work that trades less in establishing sacred cow archetypes and more to show people as they are instead of how they would like to be seen or represented.

And isn’t that just the central tenet of artfulness–the dialectic between hyper-stylization as a destination in and of itself vs that rare effortlessness that takes oodles of effort to accomplish but the accomplishing carefully erases any sign of over-the-top intentionality on the part of the creator.

For something as heavily contrived as the above image is: shot in a studio, with precise lighting orchestration, there is something compelling about the way it absolutely doesn’t read as pornography in spite of what it depicts.

(Full disclosure: the above is not the image I wanted to post most of all. I am especially fond of this one from the same series but I couldn’t find a HQ scan of it, unfortunately.)