Ethan James Green – Connor Wall for Arena Homme+ (2016)

Green started as a fashion model but he eventually moved from in front of the camera to behind it.

I can think of several others who have followed a similar trajectory: Ellen von Unwerth and Lina Scheynius, specifically. What’s interesting about those two names is that I actually mostly dig both their stuff–because I adopt a particularly dim view when it comes to self-proclaimed fashion photographers. (Looking at trash like Helmut Newton; also, even though Annie Liebovitz calls herself a portraitist, her practice is thoroughly rooted in practicum and I have a strident dislike for both her and her work.)

But I feel like folks who start as models and then transition to roles as photographers and image makers, I feel like they are more inclined to bring clearly negotiated and carefully realized considerations about the nature and purpose of photographs and images to bear in their work. (It’s kind of analogous to a contention I’ve had for years–namely: if you put a dancer, i.e. someone who learns choreography and performs piece focused on notions of contemporary movement, into a room with a digital image maker and introduce a the topic of interrogating conceptual art; the dancer will crush the image maker at a rate which would render the occasional triumph of the image maker as statistically inconsequential.)

What former models bring is not so much a more organic sense of pose and presentation–although that is definitely the case with Green’s image of Connor Wall. Mostly there’s this emphasis on the physicality of the body. The one hand on the splurtting hose the other down his boxer briefs is a clever visual pun. But really that’s set dressing.

The hose explains the wet skin. The frame is composed in such a way that the light grey of the skin of Wall’s upper body stands out in a pronounced fashion–as does the water emanating from the hose. (A sort of emphasis speaking to the constant inconstancy of physical form.)

I don’t think this is perfect. Wall’s eyes are too deeply set and the way they just sit there like slitted event horizons and the way the top and left side of his head have no separation between the background stand at odds with everything else. Still, I am far more interested in this in 99.2% of fashion photography.