Daido Moriyama – Title unknown from Daido Moriyama in Color: Now, and Never Again (197X)

At first glance, the choice for this photo to be vertically oriented seems clever–the use of space so that the woman’s body is counter balanced in the frame by the negative space of the room around her creates a definite sense of downward movement. In other words, everything works together to imply that she’s taking her knickers off.

Stop and think for a minute tho: if you’re taking your underwear off, how often do you bend all the way down to do so? I don’t–I pull my panties down below my knees and then step out of them, the last leg out hooks the leg hole and then I kick it up to myself so I don’t have to bend over. I feel like that’s fairly common behavior.

You could also say that maybe she doesn’t want to let her undergarments touch the ostensibly funky love hotel duvet–which to me is all the more reason to push them down below your knees and step out of them.

I would wager $5 that she’s actually putting her underwear back on. The photo has just be presented in such a way where there’s an illusion that she’s taking them off.

But it’s a little off-putting to me that if she is–in fact–putting them on, instead of taking them off. There’s a sense that this image has happened post intercourse. The composition and framing tho–misrepresents the truth of the moment and in doing so renders her body permanently in a stage of readying to be sexually available for the (male) viewer.

Also, the scene is alarmingly predictive of Mary Ellen Mark’s Falkland Road project–about sex workers in Mumbai in the late 1970s.