armchair – Acetylene Eyes

Dan Kitchens – Chanty, NYC (2014)

This is quite nice.

As far as light’s concerned that’s a balanced gamut from shadow without detail (beneath Chanty’s hands), shadow with detail (the lower left edge of the frame), midtones, effing fantastic skin tone, highlights with detail (her shirt) and highlight without detail (most of her left sleeve).

If this were any other image on Tumblr, you’d see the white edge of the window that’s illuminating the room. Compositionally, it would be a terrible decision, distracting from the dynamic tension between light and dark. Instead, the window is excluded and instead the only hint of it besides the light it’s introducing and subsequent shadows cast, is the left arm of her top. Along with the chair favored slightly to frame left and angled ever so slightly toward the window, the frame is well balanced. (I can’t remember ever seeing this before but it’s a great notion–in traditional photography, if anything too near the edge of the image is blown out, you actually have to increase the amount of light it gets when making a print in order to burn it in so that it does not appear to be the same color as the paper.)

I’m pretty sure this has been edited post-capture–the left chair arm appears to have been dodged and the right chair arm appears to have been burned in to increase the sense of dimensionality.

Taken together, this creates an aesthetically pleasing image that is rich with texture: carpet, chair, wallpaper and curtains–not to mention Chanty’s hair and skin.

I’m not 100% sure about the lampshade behind her head. The shadow cast by the lampstand is super obvious and I think that distracts. Also, her expression seems less expression than transitory shift between expressions.

My gut instinct if it were my image and I was editing it, would be to go back and try to pull some texture out of the lamp shade, or just darken in in a fashion not unlike the lower left corner of the frame has been burned in

Source: openbooks

Paul Freeman – Adam Rexx from Outback Dusk (2015)

The technique employed here is nice–the waning golden hour light kissing everything with just enough light to limit highlights to the sky and making Rexx’s body push forward from the mid-ground ever so slightly. (If pushed I’d bet that some contrast was added back in during post and the black point was massaged a little.)

The limited available light imposes a truncated depth of field–I’d say about four feet from just in front of the foreground in the lower part of the frame; and the focus starts to go soft just beyond the back right edge of the armchair. (Providing some cine-style bokeh on the bushes, fence and mountains in the distance–which further emphasizes his body.

I do have two small criticisms:

The position of his legs is a little too obviously cheating his package so as to provide maximum visibility to the camera. The angle of his head and the several profile clashes with the rest of the body language.

Still, for those small objections, there is something to say about how this is an image fixated on the sexual potentiality of the nude male body–anchoring it in this setting muddles the conceptual underpinnings somewhat, because while the emphasis is the flaccid cock, there’s the presentation of the body anchored and clearly contextualized in space. (The opposite would be something like this where the image reads as a picture of a beautiful erect dick that also happens to be connected to a boy who is essentially extraneous to the image’s purpose.)

The chair sitting angled so perfectly on the shattered bricks is, yes: overly coy. The boots and hat add some kitschy fetish viability but also contribute to a sense of barely constrained awkwardness.

This is actually one of those images where I think perhaps making the sexual potentiality more explicit might have helped the image substantially. The thing about watching people fuck either themselves/someone else or multiple other parties is that while yes, it’s a crutch to use people fucking as a narrative crutch, there’s a degree of universality to the urge to get it on that’s so strong, waiting until a more appropriate moment isn’t an option.

Like with this image, if Rexx had a trail of semen on his abs and chest, the awkward bits of the image would be diminished to the point of insignificance–because the viewer will believe that he’s masturbated and in the moments after is worried if anyone has approached and he hasn’t heard them due to his breathless ecstasy.

Source: adamrexx