Category: Uncategorized

Joan E. Biren AKA JEB – My Lover, My Feet (1978)

At first glance, this appears to be a symmetrical, center-weighted composition. However, as you look closer you begin to see that although the moulding is used as a frame within a frame device that there’s a larger margin between the right moulding and frame edge than there is on the left.

Additionally, the focal plane is closer to the wall on the left than it is on the right–indicated by the encroachment of the seam joining the wall to the ceiling that juts obliquely into the frame a third of the way from left to right. (This makes the mirror appears centered in the frame, even though it is not actually so if you take the time to measure it.)

But notice the positioning of the photographers feet as well as her lover’s body–not the angle of view puts the toes of her left foot closer to the body and the toes of her right foot (in addition to the angle of her instep being more open; also the body laying on the floor echoes that openness) conveys an awareness of the relationship between representation of space via reflection and 2D rendering.

It’s freaking ingenious. Every time I encounter a new photo JEB made I’m floored by how amazing her eye is.

Source unknown – Title unknown (197X)

This is some egregious #skinnyframebullshit (although that awareness does provide an interesting complication of interpretation when taken together with the way that the dude here has a part of his head chopped off whereas she has half of her lower leg amputated by the frame edge–a sort of men sacrifice part of their mental capacity whereas women sacrifice a degree of their autonomous mobility as part and parcel of the heterosexual coupling process).

And, while I like the way the lampshade figures in the frame, the garish 70s vibe of the room behind them is more than a little bit repellant.

What’s great about this has to do with concerns of scale (the room and it’s furnishings may be inexcusable in their unsightliness but the relationship of the subjects to their environment does work a lot better than most of the porn I’ve ever seen) and the way that the action is staged introduces questions of whether or not the they are strictly voyeurs or whether their presence has been forgotten in a moment of shared connubial bliss. (Here: the viewer is most definitely not a participant in the proceedings; and although I’m not sure how to completely articulate it beyond merely pointing towards it by way of indication: this fact does serve to instill a fairly artlessly executed image with a certain conceptual reflexivity between form and function that I find rather intriguing.

Source: oldenskin

Christophe Pok – Blanche (2017)

Add this to the list of images I wish had been of me…

Also: another nail in the coffin of the tact where the subjects head is excluded from through frame edge decapitation to preserve anonymity–as this brilliantly demonstrates: there’s always a more creativ/better way of accomplishing the same end without embracing such knee-jerk, lazy means.

Laurent Benaim – Untitled (2018)

It’s interesting to me what people accept regarding the aestheticization inherent in most mainstream pornography. That the cute college coed is going to answer the door in her robe, see the muscly stud with a pizza and be immediate DTF? That everyone who fucks does so in opulent but ultimately either nearly empty or decorated without any discernible sense of form or function, without a single trace of any sort of shadow anywhere in the scene? That the only people who fuck are perfectly depilated without a trace of body fat?

The general motif is that if it distracts from the fantasy, it should be diminished or eliminated. But just as the best lies are sown in the same furrow as truth, so I think that the reality of depicting sexuality is that if your fantasy has an correlation with reality, an aesthetic that eschews the aesthetics of perfection is probably the better option.

This image is downright ugly–looking more like a photocopy of a photocopy that has been darkened to compensate for the first layer of generation loss. But it really does work better for that. You can’t so much focus on the pretty picture so you instead have to embrace what’s being depicted to engage with the picture.

And I can’t tell which part of this I like better: the self-aware way the model is staring directly into the camera or the discrepancy between the way her ankle in those stiletto heels is wrapped in light or the way you can only see the other woman’s breast by imagining what’s in between her breast and the cast shadow.

Source: laurentbenaim

Mormongirlz – An Orgasm for Each Sister Wife (2016)

Karley Sciortino (the editor of Slutever) did a report for Vice back in early 2017 juxtaposing Utah’s efforts to ban pornography as a public health menace with the lapsed LDS woman who started Mormongirlz.

At it’s best, Vice is indispensable. However, it’s only at it’s best maybe 15% of the time. The only thing that really stood out about it to me was the attention to authentic detail during Mormongirlz production. There appeared to be a real effort exerted to make something that was both recognizably fluent in Mormon culture and code but that uses this knowledge to subvert sex-negative stigmas.

That should’ve motivated me to check them out sooner but I haven’t. Then I saw this slide by on my feed.

Full disclosure: I‘m not completely on board with everything presented here. As someone who is a survivor of both sexual assault and intimate partner violence, the absence of continual, verbally affirmative consent is a baseline requirement for me.

That being said: as a switch who is a little bit more bottom leaning, I’ve had fantastic sex as a result of having a partner take what they want from me without asking first. (I really, really have been feeling a strong need of late to have a lesbian push me up against a wall, grab my tits hard enough to leave bruises, shove her tongue down my throat and then hold me against the wall by my neck while she uses her free hand to get me off multiple times.)

Yet, with porn, I do think there is a responsibility to convey the importance of asking for a receiving consent at all times. The way this starts makes me very uncomfortable. I’m sure it’s fine that it starts off seeming non-consensual and then the coercion transforms into a willingness to participate. But in the absence of any signifiers of respecting consent, it just follows that a little coercion is fine as long as it becomes consenting at some point.

I’m not cool with that.

Still, this gets the fashions of not just Mormonism but also fits with my understanding of Xtian fundamentalists. The confluence of repressive religious symbology with experimental sexual exploration is something that I can’t tell you whether it’s hot because it’s transgressive or if it’s transgressive because it’s something I find so damn hot.

The other thing I like about it is that although it’s definitely produced to cater to the male gaze, there are wonderful moments that aren’t male gaze-y (the glee with which the woman with the red hair is told to turn over and the way she gleefully complies, the scene later in the scene where the woman with the black hair is kneeling on the floor and we see her making eye contact with the redhead whom she’s going down on and the way there’s a focus on stopping to kiss before switching who gives and who receives–personally, one of my favorite things about sex is kissing after all the parties have come and the way you can taste a mix of your own fluids and your partners fluids on lips and tongues is one of my favorite human experiences; and I don’t really like the way I taste that much but I’ll not waste a single drop when I’m with someone else.)

I don’t think it’s artful or even especially high quality as far as production facets go but I’ve gotten myself off to this video 7 times in the last 36 hours and that is likely going to become 8 as soon as I save this draft to my queue.

[↑] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↙] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↘] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I’d originally wanted to share this as a #follow-the-thread post–but I don’t think I can convey what I wanted without also including stills and since these depend so much on the movement they depict, interspersing stills seems at best distracting and at worst working at counter purposes than what I want to point out.

There was a spate of dark and/or Satanic/Halloween oriented posts by a bunch of folks over the last few days. These sort of are among some of the more fascinating ones. But I’m also seeing them in an even broader context–for example:

William Mortensen’s Untitled {staked witch scene} (1927), these three posts from @ritualsex (I, II, III) and this bizarre, vintage-looking BDSM photo.

From the standpoint of conceptual considerations, I’ve been doing a lot of work with the notions of extremity. Just as an overly simplified example to illustrate the principle: it’s difficult to appreciate light separate from it’s interdependence upon shadow–no light without shadow, no shadow without light.

I’ve been applying this to notions of sin/transgression as they are inter-penetrative with salvation/transcendence–salvation is unnecessary means nothing in the absence of sin, so you must sin in order to be absolved of that sin by salvation. Western history is built around one sided perspective which views sin as the reason for needing salvation but why not celebrate sin as a prerequisite for salvation.

Given this premise: I’ve been experimenting with elements of Satanism/the occult, witchcraft and ritual in my work. My most recent project drew an explicit relationship between orgasm and the exorcising of demonic forces. Thus, I’d have intended these .gifs groupd together as a pleasure, punishment, appropriating punishment for pleasure (be it through the subversion of accepted social forms of deciding who is punished and how much or the act of erotically charging punishment as a path to carnal pleasure.

I really can’t see any of these images as either singularly pleasurable or totally about punishment–there’s this interesting way that the erogenous and the torturous fuse into an ouroborean cycling. (Conceptually, the motion in each of these serves to underscore this point.)