Category: Uncategorized

Creyr Glas Lightworks – Isola Bathing Nude (2016)

I find it positively odd how many photos of people in bath tubs there are on Tumblr. I mean, if you want to think of a room with decent lighting bathrooms are not the first option that comes to mind. (Perhaps it’s because I live in New York City where most bathrooms are windowless, feature only overhead lighting and are so small where if you turn around too fast, you’ll run into yourself.)

Most of these photos tends to strive for the sort of ideal frame within a frame as exemplified by Lee Price’s Pink Cupcake along with his latest series Surfacing.

The rest seem to juggle having a high enough angle to see into the tub while also being close enough to the subject so as to not have the composition overwhelmed by bathroom related scenery.

Chip Willis’ extremely clever use of a mirror to open up this incredible image of Nathalia Rhodes is a personal favorite. And I’d wager Creyr Glas Lightworks is familiar with it based on the image above. The pose is reminiscent and the mirrored sunglasses suggest further points of comparison.

Compositionaly the angle of the tub edges lead the eye at an upward angle toward Isola’s face, the shower curtain calls out, demanding attenting and we’re aware of the fall off of light as we move away from the tub, the eyes snap back, drifting back and forth between her genitalia and her mirrored shades.

The rule of thirds informs this shot. The inside edge of the tub at the top and the inside edge of the shower curtain.  The top of her right leg is also more or less aligned with a third segment of the frame.

I just really do not like the fact that her legs are amputated at the ankle. It implies a lack of mobility and given how wide the angle of view is I suspect the image maker lined up the shot to perfectly observe the rule of thirds and then leaned in closer to give it a little bit edgier feel. That edgier feel does not vibe at all with the tone and feel of the image. (Isola seems pretty comfortable and devil may care about what anyone else thinks about her or her body in the moment presented.)

I have no idea regarding the image makers background but this was taken with a Fuji X100T (a great for the price, MFT rig). But it’s digital and the black frame is something you’d not have the option for if you were working in traditional B&W–although it would work for B&W slides (further the mirrored sunglasses are positively made for B&W chromes, but I digress). That ultra bright bath tub edge in the lower right foreground would have to be substantially burned in to read on a traditional print, which would make getting a more or less even white across the entire bathtubs visible surface a nearly day long process in and of itself.

Still, despite the considerable flaws, it’s a memorable image in a way that 95% of the tubshots I’ve featured previously just do not accomplish. That’s worth noting, I believe.

Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Anina Silk and Joy (2010)

I’m not 100% on the attribution here but I’m pretty sure the year and performers are correct. (If anyone knows where they real clip originates, I’d be interested in seeing it actually.)

Ass play isn’t really my thing. It can absolutely shorten the length of time it takes me to climax and it changes my awareness of what muscles do what when I’m orgasming. Neither of those things really add anything to the experience for me.

If my partner is into it, I’m willing to experiment just so long as my partners mouth as well as my mouth don’t go anywhere near an anus or anything that’s been inserted into an anus. (I know everyone on Tumblr swears about how wonderful analingus is to give and receive, but yeah… no thank you.)

Thus, it’s a little odd that I’m including this in some ways–considering it’s ostensibly a warm up for anal fisting. The reason I like it is two-fold.

First, it reminds me of being five. I had a friend in my neighborhood named Dirk (not his real name but his real name was also disturbingly phallic in hindsight).

Dirk liked to play a game called ‘butt work’. One person would pull down their pants and lay face down on the ground the other person would pull the cheeks of the butt apart and look at, blow on, tickle or insert a finger into the other’s rectum.

I liked the shameless curiosity of it. The experimentation involved.

It was also turn based. I’d lay there hidden from view of the adult world by bushes while someone probed my body. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing but I knew there’d be a chance for me to be equally curious about their body if I was patient.

It’s that sort of I won’t ask you to let me do anything to you that you also wouldn’t ask me to do to you mentality that appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Although I would also like to make porn at some point, I’m currently interested in pushing my personal photographic work in a more erotic direction. But I am patently uncomfortable with asking anyone to do something unless there’s some sort of mutuality to it. I have zero interest in pursuing anything exploitative.

I’ve not made much progress on figuring it out. But I did want to point to the mutuality that radiates from this image and to point to that feeling as something I’d like to learn how to encourage and foster in my own work.

Hans Bellmer – Studies for Georges Bataille’s L’histoire de l’oeil (1946)

Beyond a generalized outline and the Freudian psychoanalytic babble about the more unsettling aspects of his work–erotomania, pedophilia, etc.–my gut feeling is that the majority of art historians really get Bellmer all wrong.

It’s a bit too facile to call him a perverted pedophile–I won’t argue that his work doesn’t support these claim but only pursuing it to the point of dismissing him for his proclivities is perhaps cutting of one’s nose to spite one’s face. (Especially when you realize that almost all of his work that incites cries of pedophilia was a response to the cult of the perfect body in Germany circa the 1930s.)

The thing I think it’s important to keep in mind is how Bellmer repeatedly situated his work to stand firmly in a position counter to authoritarianism.

I find the Freudian analyses of him and his work even more frustrating–with their insistence on interpreting surrealist images as coded subconscious projections, i.e. Bellmer was a repressed homosexual (at that I have to question whether the person making that claim has ever even really looked at his work in more than a cursory fashion, he’s very much obsessed with female sexuality in a way that no gay man I know is…)

There’s talk of oedipal anxieties and fear of castration–and while both fit into the anti-authoritarian locus of his work, I read things differently. I feel a sort of shared experience with Bellmer–an overarching sadness at AMAB status and a sort of erotomania as the only perceived means of recovering some of the experience of what it might be to experience sexual awakening in a manner suiting your actual gender identity.

I feel like so much of Bellmer’s work is actually more literally anti-authoritarian than most people realize–because it channels a frustration with authoritarianism where your experience is limited by being born into the wrong body.

Further, non-consensual interactions are the bread and butter of both authoritarianism and pedophilia. I don’t know for sure that Bellmer had his head entirely screwed on straight in this regard–but I can’t see that he wouldn’t have been unaware of it. And while the stories of him hiring young girls to pose provocatively for him are unsettling, I’m reasonably sure that the resulting images would most likely be to unsettling to serve as pornographic material and I think that fact is crucial in understanding Bellmer and his work.

…

On a slightly different note, given the ascendancy of Drumpf in my own country, I think Bellmer is an artist not only due an in depth re-evaluation but who also has a great deal to offer on the subject of how art should strive to fight fascism. (If there are an gallerists reading this: Ana Mendieta is another artist who needs a major retrospective stat.) 

Source: lapetitemelancolie.wordpress.com

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

I have so many complicated feels about this…

On the one hand the way she’s curled in the frame with the dude pressing into her from the left while pinning her wrist against the couch as the other guy leans in so that she take his cock in her mouth is super problematic–tied up in patriarchal notions of female receptivity and convenience with regard to male sexual gratification.

And yet, that’s countered–to a small degree–by the way that she is stretching to meet the dick she’s sucking and the way her foot is pressed into the other guys face is probably some foot fetishist shit but it does suggest a degree of control and willful participation.

(I also completely fail to understand non-queer instantiations of group sex–but then I tend not to really understand normal human boundaries beyond the most basic notion that your right to swing your fists ends where my face begins. Also, I find it hilarious that with that heteronormative wisdom that a woman is supposed to save herself for a man while men can fuck whomever, whenever–that strictly hetero threesomes increase the woman’s number by two and the male participants by only one. Lastly, if you’re in a threesome, why not maximize your pleasure. I mean I’ve never been in a full blown threesome but the times I have that have gotten close, I’ve instinctive engaged physically with both participants. I just don’t understand how it’s any fun any other way. And if you’re a dude who likes gay-for-pay lesbian action and still fully believe that the actresses are straight but you’re not okay sucking a little bit of dick to liven things up then you are super gross.)

Really, what appeals to me is the sort of twisted empathy I feel towards her. I’ve mentioned before how we speak of desire most often in terms of hunger. I don’t experience it that way. My experience of desire is closer to thirst.

I don’t think you can read this in a way that illuminates anything about thirst but as far as hunger, I feel like these dudes are hungry for her body and their very real and physically demonstrable hunger functions simultaneously as a sort of you are hungry and I care about you so I want to feed you, I am not hungry but I am thirsty and the way you need me takes a bit of the edge of the thirst I feel.

I have to have that feeling of being needed and if I were ever in a situation to have people need me in a fashion of a kind with the above image, I would not squander it.

Source: xxx-filesss

Toshio Saeki – Renrui (1972)

Apparently, this is a work within a genre known in Japan as ero guro nansensu–a literal translation of the English phrase “erotic grotesque nonsense”.

A lot of it gets lumped in with hentai and the term has become synonymous with gore.

There’s an article over at Vice’s The Creators Project and honestly I’m head over heels for all the references in that article (which includes the above).

It strikes me that ero guro provides a sort of broad overview of how pornography might be a subject for artistic contemplation–since true ero guro seems rooted in a sort of code switching where political and cultural realities are rendered as viscerally extreme metaphors.

I read the above as a sort of meditation on grief. The narrative elements suggest that the woman ostensibly masturbating in the foreground has lost her husband–who is picture and perhaps also peaking out from the hot tub in the background.

There’s a ritualistic element to the way the people in the background are staged. And the meaning seems to me to be illustrating a correlation between the publicness of loss, grief and grieving compared with the private-ness of masturbation. Except where what is done privately to get by is suddenly performed public and judged by others.

It’s compelling and matches very closely to my own experience of grief and grieving. And that’s the thing with all the stuff in the aforementioned vice article: it resonates with me in a way with which I am not entirely comfortable.

Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Flora & Fauna (2016)

Any one making an artsy image of someone pissing is firmly standing in Emmet Gowin’s formidable shadow. (Especially when it’s a B&W image like above.)

I’m referring specifically to one of my favorite ever photographs that Gowin made of his wife Edith peeing in the open doorway of a ramshackle shed.

There was an article in The New Yorker several weeks back about this photograph that’s more than worth the two minutes it takes to read.

I’m not willing to place the above image on even close to the same level as Gowin’s photo of Edith. But the article winds down with a sort of lamentation on the fate of depictions of intimacy in our current mass culture of oversharing:

I wonder, sometimes, about the fate of this kind of photographic
intimacy in the age of Instagram, when users are encouraged to share the
granular details of their lived experience, their most nominally
intimate moments, but on a platform governed by likes and clicks.

To me, the above image may function in the fashion described but despite some pretty gnarly technical flaws (#skinnyframebullshit being a huge one), there is something carefree and playful about it that turns what might otherwise be a salacious image, into something much more matter-of-fact.

It’s also worth mentioning that the model in this image is doing some crazy great work. I’ve never seen anything quite like this amazing image of her by stef-des.

Source: florafaunauniverse

Hector Pozuelo – Karina (201X)

This is a great example of using color as a unifying compositional tool; unfortunately, it’s also some insipid #skinnyframebullshit.

But, wait–you counter–I’m reading this top to bottom and not left to right: how is it #skinnyframebullshit?

Well, it’s one of those instances where either (and in this case I think both apply equally): the skinny frame was less about contributing legibility to the image (instead it was about using the slow gradiations of the sky in combination with the color of the towel to get some really exceptional skin tone) and the vertical orientation was an effort to erase as much of the exterior context as possible.

I am convinced that given that she is making eye contact in such a way with the camera and the fact that essentially the grade as the sky rises from the horizon encompasses both the same hues as the towel and her irises, I think cutting the sky as it approaches the same color as the towel and then letting the towel and her eyes effectively communicate the same color range would also be a more contemplative use of color (i.e. less knee jerk and easy-peasy).

Also, it’s rare to see eye contact like this in an image. My eye wants to shift left or right and then drift back but the frame doesn’t allow that sort of movement and once I encounter the eyes, I no longer read the image top to bottom–I can only read it left to right.

Source: lynnswann