Mr. Instant Photography – Gorgeous poetic Ginger (2016)

The form of this recalls the Arseni Khamzin’s photo I featured last year–the down tilt of the camera, the balancing between positive and negative space.

I prefer the sharp, 3-D affect of Khamzin’s work but the way the muddy lighting renders the subject above so that it appears his skin tone is actually being leached from his body by the white-white of his surroundings. (I also love the insouciance with which he’s aware of the camera but trying to appear as if it could only be so lucky if he granted it even the most ephemeral of eye contact.)

The model’s pose is in keeping with the sculptural traditional of contrapasto–one leg is weight bearing and rigidly position, the other is more expressively position, whereas the arm one the opposite side from the weight bearing leg is active, the second arm (opposite the non-weight bearing leg) is also less active and more focused on balancing the composition. (Here those traits are reversed as the left hand and right foot are the ‘weight bearing’ anchors and the right arm and left leg are more expressive and distributive of weight.)

There’s also a nice dynamic to the pose, where it seems as if he rolled away so that he’d be more visible to the gaze interrogating him but also at the same time, he’s protecting  his body with his hand across his belly and bracing to potentially have to roll back towards the viewer.

From the standpoint of visual grammar, although I agree that the frame edge can be used in such a way as to imply a continuity of space between what is in the frame and what remains unseen just beyond the edge of the frame, the frame edge is usually inviolable.

The frame edge here is inviolable. Thus with the exception of half of his thumb, all of the fingers on his right hand are removed and his left leg is amputated mid-shin.

To my way of reading this speaks to an intrinsic acknowledgment by the image maker that the subject retains a degree of autonomy despite the photographers imposition of the boundaries of a frame upon the scene.