Alexander Bergström – Miss L (2014)

There isn’t anyone making fine art nudes about whom I feel more conflicted than Bergström.

Right off, I’m not really all that fond of his color work. The decision as to whether the image is in color or black and white seems less at issue than what film happened to be loaded in the camera at the time. And although he handles color skintone better than many, I just don’t ever feel that color contributes anything except itself to the sense of the image.

That being said, the one thing that is consistent throughout the work is the logic of the frame. I’ve never seen an image made by Bergström where I can find any fault whatsoever with where the edges of the frame have been fixed. (I do not mean to imply I always agree with the composition within those frame, however.)

In my estimation: Bergström is an extremely gifted, sometimes even astute B&W photographer. The problem with his work isn’t something I’d probably notice if it weren’t for a personal paraphilia.

It’s not that body hair is something I fetishize, exactly–although when it comes to women who choose not to shave their underarms, I’m likely to enter a pre-swoon state on site–I’m very much into the personal agency to do whatever the fuck one wants with ones body.

So I totally support Miss L’s decision to go bare. It absolutely suits her. But, then I start scanning back over Bergström’s work and it seems that he holds a definite preference for shaving or model’s who shave.

That’s fine, I guess. But it’s also disconcerting when my several of my friends who have children talk about how their pubescent daughters respond to changes in their body but feeling they are required to begin removing any hair that isn’t on their head. Thirteen year olds shouldn’t have to concern themselves with whether or not they need to shave their pubic area–there’s too much else going on at that time and extra bullshit pressure is the last thing a hormonal teenager needs.

Although in my informal count, the preference for a smooth vulva presents in about 65% of Bergström’s work, it adds a level of sexualization to the work that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I realize there’s nudity is a bit like identity. Sometimes its just a celebration of physical embodiment, sometimes it’s political. And yes, sometimes its sexual or a veritable grab bag of other consideration. The point is–just like how someone chooses to identify–I don’t get a say in that. It’s ostensibly up to the person whose naked to decide that. Except well, when you aren’t dealing with self-portraiture, there is another person who contributes to the identification: the image maker.

I’d never think of accusing Bergström of not respecting the women he shoots–his images exude an almost religious reverence. But I am never sure if it’s a reverence for the woman as a complete self-realized, autonomous wonder who is also capable of sexual expression or a creature who due to her ability to express herself sexually is a complete, self-realized autonomous wonder.

In the case of this image–with what seems as if it might be a reference to Dorothea Tanning’s Birthday–I’m willing to err on the side of giving the image maker the benefit of the doubt that it’s the former option and not the latter.

Unfortunately, with all the work, I find myself not only confronted with beauty and skilled craft, I also find myself always wondering whether its the former or the latter that held sway in the exchange between being seen and seeing that went led to the creation of the image.

Stanely Stellar – Jerkoff (1977)

It’s mind boggling that the site of this photograph looks like this now.

However, if you didn’t know a bit about Stellar and/or the history of pier 46, there’s nothing to immediately betray the image as anything less than contemporary. (The towel, facial hair and discarded underpants strike me as par for the The Hipster Porn Project-course props.

I have always felt this profound and extremely problematic nostalgia for the NYC circa the late 70’s/early 80s. The grit and desperation. Patti Smith. Swans. But also the AIDS epidemic and a despite being post-Stonewall there was still a prevailing rampant homophobic sentiment.

For me that milieu tries to shift what I think of this image. I say tries because I see it as both brash and dangerous–regardless of where it was shot. But there’s also a beautiful openness to it. And I don’t care whether or not you see me, this is who I am. (I’m someone who always views radical honesty as worth whatever risks comes with it.)

And as much progress as has been made–not that the work is by any means complete–I do feel a heavy despair knowing that living in the city these days means there’s little (if any chance) I’ll ever encountered this sort of open display of sexuality in public but I’m accosted by Justin fucking Bieber’s Calvin Klein wrapped package on the side of every fifth bus and bus stop enclosure.

I can’t help but think of Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo. In the same year, Stellar made this image, Shamloo left Iran to protest the Shah’s regime. He traveled around the US lecturing at various colleges.

I’m not sure if it’s apocryphal but apparently a number of people were rather surprised when he chose to return to Iran. On being asked why he claimed that at least in Iran the mechanism of state control and oppression were clearly visible. He said that the reason America worked is because they had grown so adept at hiding the very same mechanism.

(As an aside: I can’t help making a rather obvious correlation between this image and Stranger by the Lake– it’s streaming on Netflix, you have no excuse. It doesn’t escape my notice that Stellar is essentially filling the role of the skeevy guy who stands around awkwardly masturbating while folks he’s attracted to hook up.)

Source: raveneuse

Slide to Unlock – Laundry Day (2014)

[Recalling] the Chinese legend that says that when a boy and a girl are destined for one another they are tied together forever by a red thread.

Viola Di Grado (70% Acrylic 30% Wool)

Slide to Unlock is a tumblr documenting the sex life of a thirty-something married with children couple living in London.

They’ve earned attention due to their submissions to NN and (more recently) their intense sex tape.

Typically, I’m not super fond of the couples’ sex blog thing. The whole She/He thing rarely strives for anything beyond the knee-jerk archetypal. But I’ve found myself warm to the way this couple presents the sex they have as a multifaceted part of a highly connected, communicative relationship. When I view their images, I can’t shake the feeling that if I could zoom in to the sub atomic level, that I’d see the red thread tying him to her.

That alone makes it stand head and shoulders above any other couples blog (or 95% of porn, for that matter).

Also, there’s the fact that both are all kinds of twitterpated making levels of sexy as fuck. Especially her, who I–I have to confess–has always for me borne a more than a casual resemblance to the one to whom I am tied with red thread. But in this sequence, it’s like the resemblance is even more pronounced. And I’m reminded of the way we two made love but it also foments memories of what it was like to share the burden of day in/day out exigencies.  How touch figured into everything we did inside the bedroom or out. Her fingers tracing the circle of skin between my t-shirt tail and jeans while I saute vegetables–her kids pretending to do their homework so they could side eye us meaningfully from the kitchen table. We held hands more than we didn’t.Almost every day for two years I woke up with the palm either niched in the small of her back or laying against her stomach, the first segment of my fingers nestled into her pubic fringe. And doing laundry together in that bizarre, huge but always empty Greenpoint laundromat. The coy, surreptitious teasing.If anyone had seen us they would’ve guessed we were in the first days of our relationship and not that nearly 700 day one’s.

I find this sequence to be devastatingly arousing not only because they remind me of her but because they remind me of what it was like with her, there is no room left to doubt their truth.

Source: slide-2-unlock

k.flight – [←] in the back of the bus (2008); [↑] we thank you for the spirits that dwell in us and all things (2008); [→] P1080259 (2011); [↓] good morning (2008)

I don’t know what to say.

I’m just… I mean… fuck me, whoever k.flight is, she has a perfectly, omnivorous eye. I didn’t know it was possible to be in love with images but, well, yeah… learn something new every day.

Not to sound like a twitter tween but this, this right here is fucking everything.

Absolutely perfect.

Go ahead and do whatever you want with what’s left of me. And also, if someone knows who k.flight is I would do anything, and I mean ANYTHING for the opportunity to collaborate with her at some future date.

Source: Flickr / ladyalpha

Paula Aparicio – Untitled (2014)

If there is a single, salient aspect to Aparicio’s work it’s likely the way her photos exude a feeling of post-coital tension between “the waning of ecstatic satiation and the waxing hunger of wanting more.”

This tendency is well suited to her style; but, it’s especially noticeable in the way she photographs women.

I’ve lobbed a couple of shots over the bow of the Good Ship Female Gaze previously–namely with regard to Masha Demianova’s claim her work cultivates an equal and opposite response to Berger’s seminal male gaze as presented in Ways of Seeing.

And although I am doubtful, Aparicio would ever invoke the term female gaze to explain her own work, it would almost certainly be more functional applied to her work than anywhere else I’ve witnesses its deployment.

Upon what grounds to a base such an assertion? I am (unfortunately and much to my eternal chagrin) male bodied; therefore what the fuck can I possibly know about a female gaze?

Well, if there is such a thing as the female gaze–unlike the historical male gaze–it’s almost certainly the opposite of monolithic.

I know that growing up seen by others as ostensibly masculine, my experience of attraction, gender identity and sexual desire almost never lined up with my peers.

And I do realize it’s a dangerous assumption to take the braggadocio of hormonal male children as fact based, but I do know that while far ahead of puberty I shared an almost clinical fascination with sexual intercourse and that this fascination was age appropriate within my peer group, it remained a complete abstraction.

Let me try to unpack that a bit more–I feel a very profound need to articulate this correctly. We’d talked about sex, spent hours imagining the mechanics of it and my friends all tended to extend that imagining by connecting it to their sexual response. There was no separation in the expression of attraction and their sexual desire.

What I thought was attraction was actually a need to be understood. The people who listened to me, supported me and shared glimpses of their inner lives were always the people to whom I found myself drawn.

I remember the first time I ever experienced an attraction that linked up with my sexual desire. It was ninth grade. Her name was Michelle. She was my best friend and she’d had a growth spurt over the summer between junior high and high school. She didn’t really notice and I think her family was struggling to make ends meet with private school tuition, so she kept wearing the same clothes she had the previous year. Her favorite pair of pants were these white khakis. They’d been a bit on the tight side the previous year but now they might as well have been skin tight.

I remember walking behind her to class and noticing the visible lines caused by her underwear. I looked away, immediately. Partly because, I felt like I was violating her privacy but also because I found myself stunningly aroused. But my thoughts didn’t proceed from there to a litany of sexual things I’d like to enact with her. Instead, it orbited the notion of wandering if she felt toward me the way I felt towards her in that moment. The thought that there might be a possibility she did was the fantasy I brought myself to orgasm with again and again throughout high school. (Spoiler alert: she didn’t.)

I am hardly so daft as to suggest that what makes me think the notion of a female gaze applies to Aparicio’s work is because I experienced attraction in an unusual fashion. It’s more that the memory of the feeling resonates very strongly with something in her images.

Source: Flickr / bosquesdecalas

Andrej Lupin (for Sex Art) – Apple Pie featuring Silvie Deluxe and Whitney Conroy (2014)

I stumbled across this video as a result of a production still that crossed my dash today.

In theory, sapphic desire is among my principle interests. In practice, meh. My eyes have never bled out from the repetition of rushed, clumsy oral by gay-for-pay porn vixens.

And although in the aforementioned still there is definitely an awkward lack of familiarity–which can read as discomfort–in the positioning of either women’s hands. However, the still does convey an unusually clear since of space; and that was enough to motivate me to take a closer look.

I am glad I did. Yes, there’s some of the rushed, less than passionate oral sex that so frustrates me. (Along with rote indicators that this video was made by a man for consumption by other men–absence of pubic hair, deploying fingers less as strategically penetrative stroking implements and more as ersatz erections.)

Normally, those things would be a major turn off. They aren’t here though. And I think that’s partly due to the fact that although the lighting looks like a cross between the overly dramatic look of a daytime soap and Breaking Bad, at least some thought/effort/time went into thinking about light before shooting began.

The kicker is not so much that the women do a better than average job selling the throes of their pleasure, it’s that the extreme closeups of each woman’s genitals are used sparingly. Instead, closeups are used to focus on touch, gesture or expression. Further, in most of the wide shots both women are framed so that their entire bodies are contained within the boundaries of the frame. (No amputations/decapitations, hurrah!)

But this scene above is not only the one I orgasmed to while watching, it represents something I’ve never seen before– a director setting up a scene where everything is played toward the camera but instead of going for the closeup, we are forced to take a step back and watch from a distance. It’s a move that not only very much appeals to my own personal aesthetic but also feels unusually reverent.

Lastly, no matter how contrived I am all about the fact that the two flirt before things get hot and heavy and then the easy cut away after they’ve both supposedly gotten off is ditched to offer a sort of unwieldy afterglowing intimacy.