Tag: dress

Chip Willis – Nathalia Rhodes (2015)

As someone fluent in only one language (English); and who therefore is in the habit of reading left to right, this image caters to my expectations.

I wish I had the time to super impose angled rule of thirds indicator markings similar to what I did with this photograph by Igor Mukin. It would be immediately clear that what I’m guessing is an out-of-focus towel rack in the lower left foreground, the inside edge of the tub and the mildewy grout-line between the tub and the wall separate the image into thirds diagonally.

As a westerner who’s first language is English, I read left-to-right. thus I scan this image starting from the top left. The repetition of the diagonal draws my eye down and right, along the outside edge of the tub.

What’s interesting here is that unlike the Mukhin image, the diagonal of the top of the diagonals of the top and bottom of the mirror and the front and back of the toilet lid don’t align with thirds–but they do represent the most dense range of contrast with in the image.

In the absence of the second set of guiding third indicators, The angle of Rhodes legs functions as the compositional element that redirects the eye from right to left. (Notice: that the angle of her legs forms the base of an acute triangle of which the reflection of her face is the vertex.)

I’m not ready to attribute to this a status of some next level visual shit. It is inspired though. The pose and boots all scream tired porn tropes. However, the effort to include the face–anytime you shoot with mirrors you’re introducing seven different flavors of hell to the process–subverts the seeming unmitigated sexualization of the body as object. (In other words, even though Rhodes is effectively chopped in two by the frame edge, her holistic totality is at least illustrated.

The more I look at this the less I see it as gratuitously graphic. There are details that command attention: the black bobby pins against the white porcelain toilet lid, the strategic placement of the the rear hem of her dress and her gaze focused on the photographer instead of the camera are all inspired touches.

This is the first of Willis’ images I’ve seen where I’m convinced that my suspicion he uses porn tropes in a critical instead of incidental fashion is on the right track. And the fact the above is maybe a little heavy handed in its efforts to conflate fashion editorial work with pornography; however, the criticism is too stunningly on-point/fiendishly executed for me to even thing of docking points.

Tom Spianti – Eve, Night Light Triptych (2008)

The above leaves me a thousand times more turned on than something like this.

It’s less to do with the going commando. (That’s certainly hot, though.)
It’s more the way it risks transgressing the boundaries between public
and private.

For example: if a woman is naked under her dress,
when I knows it, the knowing is usually limited to myself and her.
Whereas, in the situation depicted here, although it is highly likely
the situation will remain a secret shared between only two individuals,
there’s still the possibility that it’s not: that a third party
witnessed the transgression.

A conspiracy of two where it’s
impossible to know with certainty whether it was limited to two or open
to three is something that will always reduce me to a flustered,
twitterpatedly aroused mess.

(And just to be clear, a good bit of
Spianti’s triptych work is similarly fixated and both intriguing and
sterling as far as craft is concerned.)

Arno Rafael Minkkinen – Sandy, Connecticut (1971)

My familiarity with Minkkinen pertains more to his seminal Helsinki Bus Station Theory.

Yes, I would take issues with a few of his tangents but his analogy is otherwise lethally on point.

Given that I was so moved by his words, I was put off by my ambivalence for his images. They reminded me of Jerry Uelsmann–for whom, as someone reasonable skilled in photo manipulation in a traditional darkroom, I have a great deal of respect but whose work does fuck all for me.

Mostly because I’m lazy but also due to the fact that I’m impatient, I didn’t bother to dig deeper into his work.

As it turns out, that was an appreciable mistake. If someone manages to make something that not only speaks with you but connects with you, it’s very rare in my experience that there’s not something similar animating the rest of their work.

Will I ever be into the in-camera optical illusions that typify Minkkinen’s work? Hardly. But, the man really has a knack of translating the feeling of physical intimacy into something visually manifest. That’s no small feat.

Also, I can know see a thread running from Minkkinen to Ahndraya Parlato; a thread that once observed serves to amplify the effect of both.

Jesús Llaría – no head (2014)

As in tune as I can be with logging my own process of reading images, this short circuits everything.

I’m not sure I can explain it without getting a little TMI but it reminds me of being fifteen. (Not that I saw anything like this in the flesh until almost a decade later…)

It reminds me of random, mundane things that would inexplicably trigger arousal so extreme it was actually painful.

I had already been chasing the same oxytocin/prolactin buzz for seven years as a way of smoothing out the jagged edges of my abusive adolescent existence and suddenly it was also effecting some sort of vaguely imagined autonomy over my own body.

As a friend puts it: it’s a real wonder all the masturbation didn’t inflict permanent nerve damage.

So yes: initially seeing this image resulted in me having to release some sexual tension.

Afterwards, I found myself enchanted by the way the image works. Although I’m not sure it’s ever justifiable to employ a frame as a means of dismembering a woman’s body, I can’t technically refute the decision as Llaría observes the dictum of amputating between joints instead of at them.

And there is a notable compositional logic supporting his choice. Note the repeated angle of the elbow which is not the model’s, the line of the lower half of the dresses’ buttons, the way the seam to the left of the lower button line softens the angel to echo that of the model’s right thigh only to have the same angle emerge again in the cocked angle of her right leg.

There’s also the matter of palate: excluding her bush, the image consists of three hues. The rust colored earth figures at the darker end of a spectrum that would include the more magenta tones in her skin; while the white in her slipper and dress are virtually identical. The blue of the dress makes everything else pop.

Let’s not forget texture, either–something about which I am often preoccupied. The skin doesn’t really have texture in this image; except juxtaposed between the dirt and the fabric of the dress the absence of texture becomes a null field. Unlike the ground or the dress you can’t imagine touching the model’s legs but you can recall what it was like to have touched such legs. The visual synesthesia suggests an insistent anti-objectification that subtly reminds that this is no less or no more than what you have always known.

I would be dreadfully remiss for also not mentioning that even though I am not female bodied and if I were I would not be comfortable wearing a dress, I’m more than a little obsessed with the dress.

Kim Eliot Fung – Phenomenon of Being 2006

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It’s like returning to a location that filled the child-mind with its enormity only to find it suddenly shrunk, like music that once moved you, moving on now without you.

A rule to which there are precious few exceptions.

The disparity between perception and reality has to burn away over time, like morning fog. Perhaps this is what Baudelaire was about when he advised poets to burn anything written before the age of twenty-five if they wanted to be taken seriously.

If you take the idea of poetry literally: what of Rimbaud—who wrote everything he would ever write prior to turning twenty?

What if you define poetry as did Emily Dickinson—and I do—what does this mean for the photo poetry of Francesca Woodman?

What about Kim Eliot Fung who was a teenager when she made this photograph?

I mean there are certainly criticisms that can be made here—adolescent angst, sentimentality. I might even add question with regard to why the model’s head is cut off—though I think the effort of the image has something to do with the spectators gaze and how an awareness of that implication inverts and skews notions of anonymity, gender perception/performance and the politics of visual representation of identity.

Criticisms that the work lacks refinement or is unaccomplished are completely off base. In other words, it suggests a precocious understanding of what maturity entails even if it has not yet fully reached maturation.

This is one of my favorite photographs. Unlike so many things that I return to in time, this does not seem smaller than my memory of it. If anything, the opposite is true: the image itself seems larger, richer and fuller when measured against my memory of it.

It’s my hope that Ms. Fung will return to photography at some point. Until then she makes aprons and curates the always impressive Editor’s Index.

Source: aircrash.deviantart.com

kalkibodhi:

The wall

KalkiBodhi Archives

Hitting the floor face-first woke me.

The overhead light was on already.

Thick fingers knotted in my hair; pulled till my toes pirouetted and twirled.

Alternating between being dragging and scrabbling for footing, my father hauled down two flights of stairs and planted in the unfinished basement.

The poured concrete floor was frigid.

I felt something splash onto my foot. Looking down, I saw blood clotting into my pajama top and crimson dots scattered around my bare feet.

I raised a hand to my face.

“Ten-hut!”

My hand flew to my side.

I could see Kyle crying out of the corner of my eye—a spectacular tactical blunder but Dad ignored it.

Not an especially auspicious omen.

After nine years, these sessions had grown predictable: all fuss-and-bluster at first until my father found cadence, began to enjoy the sound of his own voice and the tone would shift adversarial to professorial.

These professorial lulls never lasted. But at least while they did, I could turn off my mind and preserve energy for the worst to come.

The 2 AM lecture this morning was on the subject of Integrity (capital-I) as exemplified by Bolt’s A Man for All Season.

I had not absorbed a word of it but after an hour, the electrical buzzing of a silence that stretched several seconds too long snapped me back into full focus.

 “The body follows the head,” my father said.

And with a sinking feel, I knew what followed.

He grabbed my throat, his fingers tightening.

I knew to breathe in shallow and slow.  Not to panic. But his grip was too tight.

When you are being can’t breathe is nearly impossible to keep your arms ramrod straight at your sides. I was terrified but I was also certain I would rather suffocate than show that fucker I was afraid of him.

Not to mention, the level of disrespect fearing the man who claimed to love me would entail. Things were bad now but if that happened they would be so much worse.

And just then in that perfect moment a shiver shook my shoulders.

I was on tiptoes again, pulled towards him; held by my neck, my windpipe collapsed. Out of the corner of my eye, I could just see the snarling grey-whites of his eyes shining in his wax-fruit, steel wool stubbled skin.

I stared straight ahead, refusing to meet his eyes, to beg him not to kill me. Black spots swirled and yawned over the porous blue-grey cinderblocks in the middle distance.

“Control the head, control the body.” He said, his voice perfectly calm as he nodded my head for me.

Warm wetness bloomed in my sinuses again. I tried to snuffle it back. Couldn’t breathe. My head like it was going to explode.

A drop. Another. More splattering admist the nests of black hair on his arm.

He felt it and shoved me backwards and I fell sideways, landing on my hands and knees, gasping.

He pulled at the tail of my blue shirt, stretching the material so that he didn’t have to kneel and rid himself of my residue.

…

I suppose it makes sense that I am completely whack-a-doo about being touched.

And it’s not even being touched so much because I am fine with it as long as I am not thinking about it. If I am thinking about it and you aren’t one of maybe five people, I am likely to launch you into orbit.

There aren’t any easy rules to it I can articulate even to myself, let alone anyone else. Still, this image turns me on in some ineffable way.

But it also makes me sad. There is only one person I would allow to hold me like the young woman above. And although I trust her completely, that wouldn’t be why I would be okay with it. I’d be okay with it because she wouldn’t do it unless there was some truth in the action. I don’t know another way to put it except to say that with out me knowing it was what I craved, this woman knows me enough to grab me by the neck, force me up against a wall and whisper with her lips against my ears how very, very pretty she finds me before enumerating all the unspeakable things she intends to inflict upon my body. Calling me a filthy slut because she knows what I want even when I don’t.