Chris Maher – 0876 Two Nude Women Abstract Vulval BW Photograph (2013)

One of the things I dig about photography/image making is that although I wouldn’t argue the form is inherently egalitarian, the line separating streamlined visual simplicity and lazy/creatively bankrupt work is an ultra fine one.

I think Maher’s work is actually 98% trash. And I wouldn’t say this is necessarily good–there’s some spill on the floor behind the left thigh of the rearmost subject which really should’ve been flagged off in order to underscore the interplay between bodies and landscape style abstraction.

It’s perhaps a bit essentializing but the simplicity of it and the clitoral piercing belonging to the subject closer to the camera manage to strengthen the tension between abstraction and concrete representation.

I think there’s arguably a way to take this general premise–stretch and otherwise complicate and enliven it so that it’s more than a simple (or, in this case, most likely lazy) meditation on form that is simultaneously tawdrily titillating.