九口走召 9mouth – Untitled from Menstrual series (2014)

From one vantage: this image is a little too perfect of an addendum to the previous .gif. From another: I’m not entirely comfortable posting it.

9mouth is an exceedingly problematic image maker. I’ve posted about him before and my argument each time seems to boil down to even misogynist men can sometimes make an objectively good sexy picture.

However, engaging with his work this time around has prompted me to modify my opinion of him and his work.

The first thing that’s worth mentioning is that I’m bringing a better working familiarity with Nobuyoshi Araki and Daidō Moriyama to the table this time around–9mouth’s aesthetic being influenced heavily by them both.

The problem with this is that that the younger photographer cleaves to these sources in a blunt and non-contemplative fashion. To speak in broadest of generalities Araki’s work implicates its own voyeuristic raison d’etre through various conceptual stratagems; Moriyama tends to seek out the foreign in the familiar–in the instances of his more voyeuristic work, there’s a decontextualization of the mundane in an effort to draw attention and focus to how the juxtaposition between the erotic and the mundane infroms our notions of the limits of either category.

It feels like 9mouth looks at Araki and Moriyama as photographers who like make photos of nude women–without understanding that there is a lot more going on in their work than just gratifying a knee-jerk cishet male gaze.

9mouths work hinges not on any conceptual framework–and he very much attempts to lead with that but it’s disingenuous, self-justification at best–instead, his work is fixated on either women’s bodies as the locus of all sexual fetishization and women’s bodies presented to the viewer as if their bodies are sexually available to anyone approaching the work.

I am disappointed in myself for taking so long to see this fact. (Even by my own persnickety quibbling with compositional considerations–it’s taken me a minute to apply my own frequent criticism regarding the frame edge as a amputative tool. (For example: in the image above the woman–who is unnamed and due to the nature of the Menstrual series, inherently carrying an expiration date and therefore also disposable–has her feet amputated meaning that not only is she presented as sexually available to anyone who sees her, she also is rendered immobile through the symbolic amputation of both her feet.