Jorge Golgo Quintero – Nuda 1605A (2016)

It’s the height of irony to me that so-called ‘internet famous’ image makers are so at odds with so-called fine art photography aspirants.

The former tend to have models pose in such a way that they are standing either right next to a window or a window is implied just beyond the frame edge; the latter tending to favor a more studio-tinged set up, i.e. the subject standing in front of a seamless backdrop.

Although the resulting work might as well be as different as day from night, both are–in point of fact–motivated by a similar conceptual tact: de-emphasizing the relationship between the body and the space the body inhabits.

Now, I can’t really say I’m especially fond of studio work. (Truthfully, it’s all a bit ubiquitous and cloying to my eye.) And I can’t say that I’m over the moon about this image–I mean there are some pretty serious problems with it.

I do want to acknowledge that there is something unusually vital about this image. It’s playful in a way that most of this type of work just straight up isn’t. Yet, that playfulness that contributes a vibrant vitality, also points a little too handily towards what makes the image so fundamentally problematic.

The image is very male gaze-y. The coy pose bestows a dynamism to the work by contextualizing nudity in a fashion whereby being nude is rendered transgressive by the implied relationship between the model and the audience. (I’m naked and want you to see me, but shhh don’t tell anyone, it’s just for you–in other words, she’s enacting the same misogynist charade that makes gross ass cishet men harass women on the street.)

(There’s maybe an outside chance that Quintero might be familiar with Robert Mapplethorpe’s famous bullwhip self-portrait, but that’s likely giving more credit than is due given the totality of his work.)

The difficulty is that conceptually the image undercuts itself. Yes, the pose is dynamic. But it’s overt stylization actually works against it due to the fact that the artifice of the pose is brought into sharper focus due to the fact that the model is so close to the background and that the strobes are set up in such a fashion where the flash fill is so bright it’s casting it’s own shadow in addition to the shadow cast by the key illumination.

Such artifice only draws further attention to the hyper-stylization of the image, which in turn casts a pall on the dynamism of the pose when it’s considered in the broader swatch of art historical sexism.