Hi hi hi. Hello. That photo you reblogged with the two girls is of me (kara neko) and Brittany. Yes. But my boyfriend took that photo. Not creativerehab.

Thank you so much for the correction. (No snark intended at all. Seriously, I am trying to be careful about the curation aspect of things– something at which Tumblr seems to not exactly excel.)

I updated the post to reflect this information. Well, except the part about you leaning in to Brittany to take a picture. I believe you; but there is no way I could’ve ever guessed it that had you not mentioned it.

Also, I am a bit twitter-patted about my first ever Tumblr message being from you. Confession: I am kind of in awe of your Tumblr. In quality and content it’s head and shoulders above most of the stuff on here. Your curation is impeccable.

Kara Neko and Brittany

Ibn Arabi, a venerable Sufi mystic, understood reality as the breath of Allah—praise upon him.

All was tohu va bohu until Allah—praise upon him—breathed out, creating the world. But, upon breathing in again this newly world vanished, returning to Him to be annihilated. Until he breathes out again, calling another completely formed reality into existence.

This notion is called continuous creation.

In case that is not entirely clear there is one of those rare perfectly serving metaphors: cinema. A reel of film consists of thousands of individual frames. Each frame only a little different than the one before and after it. As the strip runs through the projector at a continuous rate, a shutter that blocks each frame as it appears and before it disappears; thus the stream of discontinuous images appear to be continuous, fluid.

Over the last four years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about stories: making some up, listening to others them their own, stripping them down like that crazy uncle who thinks he can not only fix the toaster but make it work better if he can only get it put back together again.

And I am realizing that well-told stories are almost always acts of continuous creation.

Take these two exquisite young women in the above ~~photograph~~ image. (’~~Photograph’ as it’s likely this is a 6×7 image scanned from 120 color negative film~~. EDIT: Kara contacted me to correct this was taken with an iPhone by her boyfriend.) Despite the awkwardness of the framing—seriously we all see you are observing the rule of thirds but nothing was gained by this not being framed horizontally!)—this is a seed which contains an entire narrative within it.

Look at just what is within the frame: an uninspired bedroom in a small apartment, daylight streams through the windows (yes, plural—check the mirror over the bed).

Invariably, despite even Hollywood’s best efforts one lover always ends up undressed before the other. And here the naked one leans towards the other eyeing her bust line—her pose is assertive, communicating a physical desire but her distance is close enough to make her desire clear but still respectful of possible reservations. She of the bustier appears uncertain, her hands a mix of openness and hesitation.

The story is here. There are different ways it can go, yes. But one person is more in love than the other. Both see the edge of the cliff approaching but what you survive is always preferable to what might have been. The tension holds even though we already know how it all ends already.

Source: sookie-m

Vintage porn doesn’t really do much for me. This is probably due partly to my aversion to cockamamie retro-equals-hip cults and partly to knee-jerk nostalgia irritating the piss out of me.

I dig this though for a variety of reasons.

First, although this isn’t a regularly employed position in porn position bingo, the composition is handled sensibly. It’s maybe even a little innovative—allowing an unobstructed view of the action without being intrusive.

Second, their interaction is awesome: her bliss-stoned expression, his head down focus on his prick penetrating her; the way his hand right hands grasps her left inner thigh, and her hand holding onto his side turns me on.

As a photograph: yeah, it’s a little underexposed. But I’ll take an underexposed emulsion over the god-awful, de-saturated digital images profligate on the Interwebz any day of the goddamn week. Analog brings sexy back and gives not a single fuck about millions and millions of bullshit pixels.

The above reminds me of a pinup photo. Or, more accurately perhaps: anti-pinup.

It replaces the manufactured glamor of Betty Grable with the (preferable to me) alt-punk body/sex positive grunge mien of Camille (Cam) Damage.

With all my bitching about how so many photographers cut up women’s bodies with slipshod framing, you would think I would be goddamn all over the pinup. (Can you recall one that doesn’t include the entire body? I can’t.)

But there are two things I find troubling about the pinup tradition. The first doesn’t apply but it lends weight to the second: in a pinup the model’s acknowledges the spectator’s gaze.

Miss Damage, while clearly aware of the camera on her, ignores it.

However, taking an existing form—in this case the pinup—and replacing its various components with their appositives does not a new form make; In other words: you can include all the thin, alluring, pierced beauties with a progressive take on body hair—and please do not misunderstand me, Miss Damage is so hot you have to spell it haute—but the result will invariably mimic the original form.

Inversion is like that, never quite managing to be subversive.

What bothers me is the inherent problem of pinups (as well as anti-pinups); whether intended or not, they serve as a metonymy wherein the whole of an individual’s sexuality is represented by a part, which is most often their sexualized body.

As much as I hate on pornography—it rarely struggles with this problem. Depicting the sex act is fundamentally narrative; it has a beginning, middle and end; demands choices with regard to the inclusion or exclusion of a mass of details.

As Nabokov noted: God is in the details.

Take these photographs—similar in form and content, starkly different in execution.

Top: a stunningly young woman stands on a lanai, skin suffused by white hot tropical light. A medallion—perhaps an inch and a half in diameter—dangles just below her supersternal notch from a thin black cord encircling her neck; a visual trick that succeeds in making her tiny breasts appear flat. Her carefully manicured hands hook a thumb each in the elastic waist of her bikini, offering a glimpse of her depilated pubic area and labia majora. With her head tilted forward and right slightly—she appears as if interrupted in looking down at her body, judging how much of herself to reveal—eyeing finding the aperture and the spectator lurking behind it.

Bottom: Alba, (photographed by the devastatingly talented Lina Scheynius), a stunning young woman stands naked before an amaranth backdrop. Warm amber light—presumably from a window beyond the left frame edge—angles across her chest mirroring the line of her collar bone. Another illumination echoes the angle of the window—correcting it downward slightly— casting white across her right elbow, stomach, hips, unshaven pubis, finally finding her left forearm/hand as a result of the vague contrapposto bearing of her pose. Shadowed, her head gaze downward; focused on something only she can see. A single stray strand of hair escapes the bun atop her head, dangles by her cheek.

I know I am always going on about the politics of frame lines. To what extent I mean that as pertaining to graphically sexual images or all images, I am not sure I can articulate yet.

There is a general “rule” on this matter when it comes to image making: if you have to amputate a limb with the frame edge cut midway between joints instead of closer to the joints; this creating a more life-like rendering. (Don’t ever decapitate! Seriously if you are concerned for your anonymity just take a normal picture and black out your face in Photoshop, already!)

Which of the above follows this rule? What is the effect?

Also, note how the vertical frame edges in the top image do not line up with the fence or the edge of the patio.

The young woman in the top photo is sexually appealing in the extreme. After first blush, she is perfect. At the same time, she is not someone I am convinced could ever be known in any sense. Her eye contact purports a false intimacy, implies that if our paths ever crossed I would be best served to view her as nothing more than her exquisite body instead of seeing her as someone with a life that goes well sometimes, others not so much; who has needs both met and unmet. I am not saying she is objectified so much as reduced to an archetypal idea.

On the other hand: with every shred of context removed except her body, I find myself wondering who this Alba is, what her inner life is like at the same time I am aware that she wouldn’t owe me an answer if I ever met but that if I were lucky she might not mind being asked.

In the end, the last image is for me sexier; like most of Scheynius’ photos its restraint, patience and passion sears itself like a brand onto your visual memory.

The above frame would benefit from a slight shift down and right. Setting that aside—as well as my ambivalence at best toward the Instagram trend—this image is well crafted.

Come on, you may say, explicit images of beautiful young people fucking are not the sort of thing anyone appreciates because of technical merit.

I mean, yeah, this easily succeeds at level of beautiful young people fucking. But, where it blows—pun gleefully intended—the competition away is it’s carefully considered composition.

A lot of people like to drone on and on about composition this and rule of thirds that when all you really need is to realize that composing a visual image is—whether you realize it or not—almost identical to telling a story.

Just as image makers can only represent a limited sliver of the world within a given frame, the storyteller must determine what details serve the story and therefore bear inclusion; as well as those which are superfluous and therefore best excluded.

The skilled storyteller conveys not only the sense of a story but also something of what was excluded. William Carlos Williams’ poem so much depends is the perfect example. It describes two objects; but in describing only the two most necessary objects in the scene our imagination thrills at building a seamless world around them.

The fundamental difference between images and words is that the former allows for the whole and various parts to be taken in simultaneously; whereas even describe something simultaneous by saying: at the same time this and that happened, the linearity of the sentence privileges ‘this’ over ‘that’ by an ‘and’ length measure of time.

The composition of this image guides your eye over the various parts of the image while always reinforcing its place within the whole. For example: before I even take in the extent of his nakedness—fuck, his skin is like milk cooling in the shade—I see the muted variegation of the sedge on which he is splayed.

At the same time it all shifts into sudden focus and I see everything: his outstretched arms terminating in fingers—fierce with whiteness— tangled in the brown of her hair; his hands and her head meeting to form vertex of an inverted V which tenderly frames her right hand taking his erection and guiding into her mouth to a depth only a hair’s breadth above its edged tip.

And the wide gape of his knees, a second non-inverted V, re-frames her body between his legs where she is crouched as naked as he.

Nan Goldin Bobby Masturbating 1980

For all the shit that gets thrown at Nan Goldin very little sticks.

Initially, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency seemed to me random, sloppy and enormously irresponsible. Six years later, I am beginning to see my criticism reflected more of my own insecurities than any true response to the work.

What I missed then, I think, was that the “glamorous, ambition-fueled despair” permeating these images was not a celebratory endorsement of a high risk lifestyle so much as unflinching reportage.

That these images originated in a time and place regularly mythologized for the filth and depravity it dealt in and how that filth inspired a motherfucking rock music renaissance muddle matters further.

As I see it the distinction between exploitation and providing a ‘view from the ground’ of an extremely outlying experience is as slippery as it is crucial.

For example: this image with its ontological title is all lurid flash bulb and exposed sweating skin—very fucking rock and roll. A boy lit up, frozen in the act of massaging his testicles with his left hand and stroking his erection with his right.

It’s hard to tell if he’s on drugs. Although with his heavy lidded eyes, if your starting point is looking for exploitation it is easy to think that Goldin took a junky, propped him up and snapped his picture.

Does the image read like that? I don’t think so.

It seems more likely that Nan and Bobby stayed in the same squalid Lower East Side squat. Late one over hot night, feeling extremely horny he slipped away to find a dark corner to get himself off where Goldin roaming around with her camera like always found him.

And while normal folk make an attempt to hide themselves when they are caught– just as the encroaching party averts there eyes, you are forgetting these aren’t normal folk. Both Nan and Bobby suffer from “ambition fueled-despair”.

I know something of this disease. And when you meet another who understands what it is like to be so trapped, you don’t look away. We may lower our gaze– knowing that the other will watch or they won’t. Either way they reserve their judgment because they are deeply aware that if the situation were reversed there is no doubt of reciprocity.

Edgar Degas After the Bath Woman Drying her Feet 1886

I do not buy the rationale behind the quip: “if you can’t masturbate to it; it’s art.”

Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye is widely acclaimed novel featuring jaw-droppingly pornographic interludes. I read it in one evening six years ago during which time it proved necessary to bring myself to orgasm not once, not twice but thrice.

Am I implying an ‘Impressionist’ painting was intended as masturbation fodder? Well, yes. And not because I have used it as such or think you should—okay… that last part was a lie: I have and you should. But how is what was good enough to assist Degas in keeping the ‘paint’ from drying up in his brush no longer applicable to the question of how images affect us?

First, it seems egregious to delimiting this as not pornographic as well as devoid of sexuality in the same breath. It wasn’t like Degas’ politics weren’t bass ackwards and historical those with similarly conservative worldviews have a tendency to be a wee bit sexually repressed. But even if he was secretly a horn-dog holding a candle behind a glass plate negative so as illuminate some hot harlot blowing an aristocrat, the level of detail would have been at a level comparable what these days passes for soft-core porn.

I think there is a similar desire to show something taboo but the way Degas goes about it is just a little too sublime to at first glance see how devilishly clever he’s being. Yeah, the thought of a woman in the bath makes you think you might go all tingly down there if you focus on it too much. However: instead of sensationalizing the prospect he treats it as the mundane domestic scene it is.

The first thing I notice—and full disclosure I am as far from an expert on Parisian social mores in mid-to-late 1880’s as one person can get without expending effort—it would be unlikely for such a young woman to live alone. Why do I say she lives alone? Look closely—where is she drying her feet? Yes, she’s sitting in a chair covered with what seems to be a robe but since when are bathrooms big enough for armchairs and closets? There’s no indication of a tub and this looks like a bedroom or sitting room. It follows that she has finished her bath and moved out of the bathroom to sit in the chair and finish drying off. It could be husband isn’t home or she is a working girl but either way she is demonstrating behavior only becoming of a damp trollop.

Damp trollop or not, with the feminine touch of the robe laid over the back of the chair the space—although not probably her apartment in real life, becomes hers. If we stop to question whose things these are, the only conceivable answer is hers. However it happened, she has a space of her own. She has things and she does things just as we do. In other words, we are looking at woman who is, like us, deeply human.

The ‘we’ to which I keep referring is a reference to the fact that his work is without question voyeuristic. She is unaware of being watched by someone unseen to her.

There are three more things I have to mention about this image:

First, Degas began experimenting with photograph in the early 1880’s. It is impossible to not see the effects of that experimentation here: how the extreme foreground and background become increasingly blurred as you move away from the woman’s back—the point of focus; causing the scene to appear as if through a lens with a wide aperture/shallow depth of field.

Second, models always talk about never knowing what to do with their hands. Look at this I am reminded of something that I was told repeatedly in film school but I did not until now grasp the meaning: always motivate an action. In this case, the exaggerated act of drying her feet occupies her hands in a way that is already relaxed and natural. (The way her left arm is tucked between her leg and chest is my favorite thing.) I suspect when I model mentions she does not know what to do with her hands, the real fix is not to imagine things for her to do but ask instead: what is she to be doing in the scene.

Finally, this work stands out from the rest of Degas’s oeuvre; so much so that although I find Impressionism highly distasteful, this is one of my favorite paintings ever.

I love their closed eyes, the bright flush to their faces, the bodies tense with forestalled impatience— I want you to enjoy it, enjoy me enjoying you enjoying it—a full-blown sensory flashback: I remember my knees shaking and teeth transformed to mercury quivering in my gums and the weight of knowing— God himself did make us into corresponding shapes like puzzle pieces from the clay; knowing is not enough against wanting, wanting to see this through tired-tired eyes spread holy-holy awed and wide as the wet of lips meeting and our fumbling lead boned find those secret fleshy spaces with their tiny, tiny alters to bear and burn lonely so many offerings.

The pale one, her fingers slid up almost to the wrist into the others blue-grey briefs, deeper; while she is herself caressed through white knickers— I remember the slick groove of a dew pussy leeching through cotton and then glistening silken on gliding fingertips.

Source: femaleboner