Tag: backlit

Joanne Taosuwan – The Cold, The Dark & The Silence (2008)

I could probably yammer on for a couple of paragraphs about opacity–you know: transmission vs reflectivity w/r/t light.

But even thought it’s just a shower curtain, I can’t help but see it as the surface of a puddle seething with tadpoles and she’s a god like figure who unfolds time and space and unfolds her creation by unfurling it, throwing it away from her, letting the wind catch it and then letting it drift slowing to lay upon the ground–not unlike you’d cover a bed with the topsheet in the process of making it.

If you see it like that it’s not hard to imagine this as an image of a piece with William Blake’s metaphysical illustrations. Perhaps that’s why this has imprinted itself so indelibly on my mind.

Source: portu666

msjanssen:

lovely backlight!

The Death of Youth – Alanna (2012)

@msjanssen has already covered ¾ of what’s so arresting about this image.

All I can add is that you also need to consider the angle of the light. Yes, it’s backlit; but while the background is bright and the foreground is dark, the angle of the light is falls in such a way that you can actually make out the general shape of Alanna’s face and unlike the flattening silhouetting effect of backlighting, her body has dimensionality–you can see the shape of her hips and tummy and just make her pubic thatch.

Also, you can gather enough to get a clear notion of the pattern of her top–which is super cute. The loose hanging strings contributing a casually coy hint of eroticism.

I’m generally put off by tDoY’s semi-slick, desert counter culture as new glamour aesthetic ethos. And while I think there’s room for improvement with the above image–Alanna’s left elbow gets lost in the shadowed doorframe and the down tilt of the wide angle lens renders the plumb lines of the door as converging instead of parallel and this encourages a downward cast of the gaze that walks a razor wire line between breathless appreciation and leering; in turn that renders the way both her arms and legs are amputated problematic regardless of which side the viewer tips toward.

Emmet Gowin Edith Danville, Virginia 1971

When I study Gowin’s work I am always struck by its deep reverence. Whether his subject is his wife Edith, or various members of her family or his later aerial landscape, each image is treated with the same quiet wonder.

In Edith Danville, Virginia 1971, Gowin’s wife stands in the doorway of a dilapidated shed and pisses on the floor—the scene is handled with a quiet awe rather at odds with ‘taboo’ of enjoying the sight of someone urinating.

Whether intended or not, it strikes me that this is reverent watching is not at all unlike the way pissing is commonly depicting in pornographic media.

The actress informs her partner she ‘has to pee’ and moves several steps away to stand with her legs spread wide or more often than not to squat. With this movement her body transforms from the discrete catalogue of penetrable orifices and denuded erogenous zones it is likely to have been presented as for most of the scene to something whole and complete. She gazes down at her cunt, or looks away from the camera like Edith—breaking her near constant, self-conscious awareness of the spectator. She begins to piss but by the time she remembers she is expected to be self-conscious, the camera has begun to zoom in on the fluid ensuing from between her legs.

‘Having to pee’ is, unequivocally, a need. Given the raison d’etre for porn—manufacturing male pleasure—admitting that women have needs is unusual. Admittedly, sexualizing yet another aspect of female bodied experience is problematic, but for me that is trumped by how hot it is when porn—however tenuously— implies the truth: nothing provides more pleasurable than meeting the needs another.