Category: Uncategorized

Art Shay – Simone de Beauvoir in Chicago (1952)

Shay, on how the image came into being:

“I knew someone in advertising who said she would be happy to open her
apartment to her,” Shay recalled. “I took her there. She was about 41,
still a very attractive lady. I was a ballsy 28- or 29-year-old. She
took a shower and left the bathroom door open. I always carried a Leica
(camera) around my neck. There she was at the mirror doing her hair. I
went click, click click. She turned around and said, ‘Oh, you naughty man.’”

As much as I’m thrilled that there’s an actual honest to goodness nude of de Beauvoir, I’m a little skived by the explanation of how it came about.

If you are going to take nudes of someone, you absolutely must have their consent before you click the shutter.

I know, I know–they’ll invariably be someone who says, well she left the door open and he was a photographer who had a Leica around his neck, she had to expect that might happen. LOUD BUZZER SOUND & a ‘nope.’

–But, but… if she’s really been upset, she could’ve just told Shay to never promise never to publish it or to demand he remove the film and give it to her. That she didn’t proves she’s fine with it.

Again, no. She probably was fine with it. But the point is in a situation like this, what would it have hurt for him to ask. She would’ve said sure and then been self-conscious for a bit and then gotten caught up in what she was doing again and the picture would’ve been much the same except it would’ve been consensual.

Source: billyjane

Katya Clover – Title Unknown (2016)

I’m of two minds about this image. It gets me painfully hot and bothered. So it at least has that going for it. The trouble is it’s a garbage image.

There’s no sort of compositional logic. It’s #skinnyframebullshit. There’s no rule of thirds, no golden mean; it’s merely the camera turned on its side as a means of most easily fitting the most information pertaining to Clover into the frame and (also the slimming effect that a vertical frame can impose.)

What makes the image attention grabbing is the super saturated skin tone, magental of the blanket and organ of the carrot against the bland straw and blah sky. (This is about as first rate an example I’ve ever seen of how faithful rendition of color does not guarantee a good image.)

I do like the concept–quite a lot, in fact. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Further, I love the giant wet spot on the blanket. If we knew a bit more about where she was, the image might be improved. Is she near a garden? Is that where the zucchini and the carrot came from? But there’s not enough of an indication to go anywhere with these questions. (Another short coming of the image.)

I’m not sure her pose works. It’s a little awkward but it does at least seam to be in service of what she’s doing. (I adore her expression.) Even though it is interesting, in that I feel most images like this would go for an angle more aligned with a straight on view of her vulva and anus. I always tell people that one can absolutely include graphic depictions of vulvas in one’s work, but if one want to know a general real for what’s objectifying vs what’s depiction, imagine the vulva is an eye lid, if the eye opens and is looking straight ahead is it making eye contact with the viewer? If so, there’s a good chance the image will end up being objectifying unless a good bit of other work is put in to avoid it.

Looking at this I’ve realized another thing about the difficult in using masturbation as a subject for art. It’s really a question of visual depiction of an experience versus staging the experience for a voyeur and by extension–due to the unfortunate white cishet male history of art–the male gaze.

If I can find someone interested in posing for it, I would actually very much like to reinterpret this concept as a fine art photograph–’cause I think there’s that sort of potential to the concept.

Inside Flesh – Title Unknown (2016)

If you’re at all familiar with music criticism, you know that generally there are three templates for artists with long careers of making continual relevant, ground breaking work:

  1. Do the same thing you did before–except this time around do more of it and do what you do bigger;
  2. Apply your essential voice to something completely different in scope and execution (generally referred to as ‘making a left turn’);
  3. Burn everything to the ground, then burn the ashes and only then reinvent everything again from the beginning (think: David Bowie).

If Inside Flesh can be said to be following any of the above trajectories, it would be #1.

To me, that’s not just interesting–it’s surprising. Let me attempt to explain what I mean…

I’ve always appreciated IF’s aesthetic. But I’ve always worried that it’s a little too rigidly circumscribed–the whole glitching, industrial hell thing seemed to me that it would become cloying at a rather quick clip.

Quite the opposite, in fact: it feels like someone exploring the interstices between art and pornography could do worse than to immerse themselves in IFs oeuvre.

What I’ve noticed is a degree of conceptual recursion in their work. The limitations of their aesthetic are frequently mirrored in a certain heteronormative predisposition in their work. For example: they have a lot of scenes like this, where the viewer sees an nearly disembodied phallus vaginally penetrating a definitely embodied woman. (I really like that their frames tend to include the entirety of the woman’s body within the frame.)

However, there are two things that distinguish IF from most straight porn:

  1. Running counter to the strict aesthetic limitation (or perhaps, because of them), IF’s work possesses a profound sense of animalistic desire–the limitation of the form presents itself as artifice (or, you might say: the pornographic fantasy of it all is a set dressing intended to be seen as a set dressing which contributes an ambiguity to whether the form isn’t merely a means of helping to illustrate the strange beauty of two people who would be fucking in which the same way with or without the production design, props, costumes and cameras rolling.)
  2. As unsettling as some of it is, there’s never a sense that what the viewer sees is in any way divorced from a legitimate experience of interpersonal intimacy.

In their artist statements IF refers to their ongoing preoccupation with “human carnality in all its aspects.”

I know they are based in Poland. But I can’t help seeing what their doing as a sort of radical fuck you to on going policing of sex workers by ‘well-intending’ fuckwits–I’m thinking specifically of the AIDS Healthcare Foundations utterly ridiculous ballot initiative that would empower private citizens to personally sue adult performers not wearing a condom in adult media.

I am about as against the contrived Puritanical prudery that suggests sex is a sin in the eyes of some deity as a means of dodging unwanted pregnancy, disease, eternal damnation, etc., as one person can possibly be. When it comes to sex positivity, I err on the side of over-the-top. I think people who enjoy sex should have more and better sex.

By the same token, I find the sort of heteronormative no risks/all reward notion of sex perpetuated by most mainstream pornography to be only a bit less repugnant. I mean how many times have you watched a scene where a cable guy or plumber shows up to fix something and upon finding the person with the troubles is scantily clad and horny, things progress to sex with little if any flirting, communication or foreplay. It’s pure simulacrum.

But although it’s fantasy, and part of the fantasy is the randomness and availability, the context indicates that there should be behavior in place that pays attention to safer sex. (I say ‘safer ‘specifically because I don’t think there is any such thing as 100% safe sex–at least if your doing it right by recognizing that risk is an intrinsic feature to anything in life truly worth doing–and vulnerability, connection and giving expression to unfiltered desire are all risks; plus, the queer milieu in which I maneuver, I don’t know a single person who uses dental dams or condoms when performing oral sex.

My point is you choose your level of risk and accept the consequences. It’s not really anyone else’s call to make.

Yet, I feel like whereas most porn would argue against condoms for being elements that pull the viewer out of the fantasy, their absence in feels like a radical decision to experience the extremity of human carnality.

And it’s true: safe sex is good sex. But there’s something about unsafe sex that is completely immersive. (It’s like the difference between the hallucinations associated with mushrooms vs LSD–when I’m shrooming, I always remember I’m shrooming, when I’m tripping on acid, I sometimes lose site of the fact that I’m hallucinating–interestingly, I don’t especially like LSD.)

Like you can feel the smallest changes in engorged rigidity, changes in the viscosity of vaginal mucus, the slow build up of clenching and unclenching micro contractions, the warm surge of unrestrained ejaculation.

Really, I think it’s exactly these sorts of intangibles that IF is trying to convey in their work.

Source: herlovelygore

Michal Buddabar – Paula Lyily (2016)

Geez Louise, what are they putting in the water in Poland? The concentration of fucking fantastic image makers active there is just effing breath-taking.

Buddabar is putting out some interesting work. You can easily pinpoint specific influences. For example: if you take any artist featured multiple times by The Quiet Front, you’re going to find traces of those folks work in Buddabar’s.

I don’t want to belabor that point by cross-referencing specific examples but I do think the it’s useful to compare and contrast with Alexander Bergström.

There’s a huge degree of overlap between their two respective bodies of work: an unapologetic voyeurism, similar form and tone, etc. Bergström‘s use of color is superior, further I think he’s arguably the better technician.

However, where Bergström seemingly tries to sublimate his more perverse (I’m employing my preferred value-neutral connotation w/r/t this term), Buddabar is more unflinching–also, although this perhaps wasn’t the case two years ago, he seems to be a much better editor than Bergström.

But what I also love about this image is it’s yet another wonderful example of how using the frame lines to crop out someone’s face in service of preserving anonymity is just a garbage decision. There are so many other ways to go about it and even the worst, most ill-advised face blocking device will be infinitely better than figurative decapitation.

Either way, definitely check out Buddabar’s work–it’s pretty great, especially the more recent stuff.

Source: buddabar

Susan Meiselas – On the A Train to Rockaway Beach, NYC (1978)

If you don’t live in NYC, you’re probably unaware of what the Rockaways have to do with fuck all.

I’ve been going out there–primarily to take photos–for a dozen years. In that time, I’ve learned a little bit about the history surrounding the place.

Alright, so there was this guy named Robert Moses who was an extremely powerful city planner. A great deal of what you think of with regards to NYC’s infrastructure was his brain child.

He was also an elitist asshole–who thought the poor needed to know their place and stay there; but part of his plans to keep them in their place involved small, perfunctory concessions.

He developed Jones Beach on Long Island as a place far enough out that only people with cars could get there. (Further, he built bridges and overpasses low, so that buses wouldn’t be able to navigate the roads to and from the beach.)

But, he established Riis Park as a beach location accessible by public transit.

When I first went out there in 2004, the desolation and disrepair of the site appealed to me. It was broken down but just functional enough not to seem completely ruinous.

In the wake of Super Storm Sandy, it’s changed dramatically. There was extensive damage and with the subsequent, inevitable redevelopment, The Rockaways have become the summer beach destination of choice for hipsters. (Although to their discredit, the dummies tend to favor the beaches west and north of Riis Park.)

So although I’m not exactly the biggest Meiselas acolyte, this image resonates with me because it’s familiar.

For example: the subway car in this image is only one generation behind the cars that still regularly run on the C line.

And as you travel toward the outer edges of the subway system, you always encounter increasingly odd behavior. I’m not entirely sure what these two young women are doing but I suspect they are showing Meiselas that they are wearing their swimsuits under their clothing.

Source: oldnewyorklandia