Tag: female nude

Ryuko Azuma – Sakuranbo (2005)

I like the way this presents the entire body in a compelling pose that suggests both a bilateral and hemispherical symmetry (i.e. the position of her arms mirrors that of her legs).

The line work is clean and simple. Very minimal tonal shading contributes dimension.

I also really dig that those appear to be the best cherry known to humankind–Rainer cherries.

In other words: this is the perfect balance between visually arresting and WTF. (But why the fuck does her vulva look so totally resemble a Band-Aid?)

Source: puddingpop

Mutsumi Yamamoto – Untitled from L’Eros Sacre (2010)


Death, The Last Visit
By Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long
as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair
and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me
until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever
come undone.
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt
this good.

AJ Moksha – Rainy days featuring Kyotocat (2015)

The shadow-light interplay in this is masterful. Mid-tones appear compressed (the hallway wall in the left foreground is separated from the mid-ground wall behind it more by softening of focus than tonal variation) allowing for a great range of detail in the highlight areas. Alternatively, there’s little variation in shadow tones–used to staggering effect to separate Kyotocat’s silhouette from the mid-ground wall.

Unfortunately, the air return vent is an eyesore and detracts measurably from the image.

The dangling bulbs are a strange addition. Are they ornaments or are they those new fangled things with succulents growing in them. (Given the dim illumination, I can’t tell.)

I am torn between thinking their inclusion adds an unpleasant touch of kitchy contrivance–I mean they wouldn’t be hanging at that level in a hallway or whomever passed them would knock their head against them; thus they appear to be dangled like a puppet into the frame for the sake of the picture.

It reminds me of Jeff Wall’s After “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue–which was quoted nearly verbatim by the production designers for HBO’s terribly uneven but dumbfoundingly ambitious series The Leftovers.

Or–since these bulbs are not illuminated–it could be a reference to Amir Naderi’s Davandeh (one of my top five all-time favorite films). In it, the young protagonist lives on an abandoned ship, the roof of which is covered with hanging bulbs.

There’s also the matter of the image being some pretty flagrant #skinnyframebullshit. The vertical frame renders the proportions of the wall in the left foreground, the wall in the mid-ground and the pitch dark hallway at the right of frame. A horizontal frame would have required a definitive decision on how to use the size or each plan relative to the others as a means of unifying the composition. With the vertical orientation, the obviousness of the arbitrary way in which they are used is diminished–the to detriment of the work, sadly.

Source: ajmoksha

Un instant avec Elle – Myself, intimate moment (2015)

So here’s a picture which proves an exception to the rule of my general distaste for close-ups in image making.

The gist of my objection is that by diminishing contextual cues with regards to setting (interior, exterior), orientation relative to other subjects (or lack of other subjects for that matter) in a given space, time of day, historical epoch, etc., etc., the information the image can clearly convey is severely truncated. This truncation has a tendency to be employed to foster a sort of forced intimacy–this is especially true with regard to portraiture, where seeing something with one’s own eyes up close invites the viewer to bridge the absence of detailed information with a sort of god-like omniscience; or–to state it in a less abstract fashion–the close-up encourages spinning the inherent lack of certainty as to the identity of the subject into a sort of nebulous knowing predicated upon predictable tropes and societal preconceptions. The close-up works–more often than not–because it gives the viewer permission to fill in a number of blanks. And while this is the base nature of the eternal question with regard to what the frame includes and excludes, typically, I feel like close-ups encourage the viewer to fill in blanks they quite frankly have no business filling in.

This image succeeds partly due to its simplicity. There’s a balance between the warm tone light and the dense shadow space, a similar equivalence between smooth skin-tone and texture; also, flatness and dimensionality–the subtle shadows imposed by the musculature are luminous here.

The composition doesn’t quite work: one triangle is formed from the vertices of the shadow space adjacent to the left hip, between the legs and in the fall off at the right hip; while either leg form vertices with an implicit third point at the navel just beyond the lower edge of the frame. This results in the image having an unbalanced visual heft–with the scale tipping slightly to frame right, undermining the careful balance so stunningly apparent throughout the rest of the image.

However, there is one incredible astute conceptual conceit managing to eclipse this minor transgressions. It’s sort of hard to explain it but try something: invert the image and look at it; now, return it to it’s normal orientation. There is a way in which the grammar of an image suggests that the bottom of the frame is closer to viewer and the top of the frame is further way. Orienting the frame as above makes the action depicted not for the viewer. (Given the angle of the frame it’s not strictly a POV perspective either. In tandem with the caption, an intriguing tension is created between a voyeurism one is allowed to observe even though they are not invited to participate with.)

lusting-and-thrusting:

Samantha-fucking-Saint

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

After my first encounters with porn, I rapidly developed a abusive relationship with it. Namely, my curiosity regarding it always seemed to outweigh the loathing and alienation it triggered.

There was a local video rental chain with a location within walking distance of my house. After some cautious prodding, I realized that several of the staff members didn’t give fuck one when it came to determining whether or not I was old enough to rent items from their enormous back room.

Thus by the time I was sixteen I was renting two or three XXX videos a month.

Amazingly, I found some stuff that if I didn’t necessarily like, it certainly interested me. In particular, a gonzo series called New Faces, Hot Bodies–made by, if memory serves a Cleveland based kink smut purveyor named Bob Bright–never failed to pique my interest.

As I remember it was the diversity of the scenes that fascinated me. In any one tape, there would be a range of scenes from vanilla to hardcore and bizarre kink fetish.

I believe a testament to how different they were is that I can still vividly remember a number of scenes from the series. One was my first introduction to bukkake–in the scene five to eight studs ejaculated at least 3 times a piece over a young woman while two other women used spoons to collect the semen off her body so as to feed it to her.

In another scene in the first video I from the series I ever viewed, there was a parenthetical return to the first scene. The lead in said something like fifteen minutes after we last saw them and then the couple went for round two.

I found the second scene unbelievably hot. It didn’t matter that it had likely been filmed on two separate days. The imposed continuity and the notion that the scene didn’t end just because the guy blew his load really turned me on.

…

It was another five or so years before I saw anything similar. It was one of those videos that makes you feel a little uncomfortable watching. Low production values, with most of the shooting budget going to acquire a superficially opulent location and then the performers being paid in drugs.

The performers were clearly coked out of their brains. The guy was fucking like a spastic jack hammer. He pulls out, ejaculates so forcefully the first two spurts shoot over the woman’s head and end up on the carpet. He immediately starts rubbing his glans around the woman’s clitoris, while a small puddle of come leaks out of his cock and then he promptly reinserts and continues as if he’s just getting going.

…

All this is by way of saying I like deviations from the straight cisgendered heteronormative porn script. For example, in the image above it’s clear that guy has already ejaculated forcefully on the woman–who the captions say is Samantha Saint but I remain unconvinced of that attribution; yet, the scene clearly continues while he ensures that she gets off.

Yes, the notion that sex has to result in orgasm for both parties is also fundamentally heteronormative but it’s one of those things that although micro-ly problematic, still–for me at least–represents a decided improvement on the status quo.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

Another thing I don’t like about most porn is that even when they don’t cut to extreme close-ups of what’s going on at the site of various erogenous zones, they position the camera in such a way as to maximize the unobstructed view. It always feels annoyingly gratuitous. (I’m probably an anomaly but I am far FAR more likely to masturbate along to something like say this than this.)

Although I’m really not into the down tilt in this and how it renders the verticals diagonal instead of straight up and down. I don’t feel the angle was chosen to provide a titillating view of the one participants genitals and anus. Instead the view seems chosen to convey the most coherent information about both the space and what is happening within the space. The explicit nudity just happens to be a bonus.

Source: refer.ccbill.com

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

There is no end to the way the marketing of pornography as if it’s an a la carte menu alienates me.

It’s like there’s the default menu–straight, heterosexual and cisgendered. Solo, oral, anal, gonzo, creampie, teen, milf.

The gay porn that I’ve seen benefits from it seeming as if the dudes really, super actually want to be fucking each other. Sorry not sorry; thirst is hot, y’all.

Lesbian porn that is of a for us by us sort of bent is unquestionably my preference.

But I just don’t understand the segregation of menus. Like, can we get porn where one scene is your typical Vivid-esque cis-het, blowjob, vaginal penetration, rough anal sex followed by facial money shot and the next scene is army guys hazing the new recruits in the barrack’s showers. You don’t have to watch it if that’s not your thing. But I think being confronted with things that aren’t particularly what get you hot and bothered serves to normalize them as valid expressions of human sexuality.

I don’t know where these images are from. My guess is that their probably from one of those cliche reluctant bi- productions–where there’s an element of forcing someone to do something they don’t especially want to do.

I’m super put off by that for many of the reasons most mainstream porn makes me feel like I need to take a dozen scalding showers. Like where are all FFM threesomes depicted so that the ladies get it on with each other and the stud but almost all FMM porn involves the studs high fiving over the woman they are penetrating from either side. Like seriously, if there was a possibility that every now and then the woman in an FMM would say to the dudes, you don’t get to touch me until I see you suck each others’ cocks, I’d watch a hell of a lot more porn.

Sandra Torralba – [↑] Estranged Sex 4 (2008); [←] Estranged Sex 8 (2009); [→] Estranged Sex 12 (2009); [↓] Estranged Sex 2 (2008)

I love these so effing much I can’t even…

It’s partly the pathos–the simultaneous ravenous curiosity and trepidation that comes along with exploring the boundaries of your sexuality as an adolescent, the libidinal asymmetry that touches all relationship, the fine line between performing your sexuality in public and the need to restrain or privatize the sexual as it pertains to your family and television as active incitement to participate voyeuristically with the sexual performance of strangers.

I’m not quite sure these qualify as capital A Art, the process that goes into making these images is reminiscent of Gregory Crewdson–about whom I make no secrets to the fact that I think his work is heinous excrement not even deserving of inclusion in discussions of lower case a art; but if you spend any time perusing Torralba’s blog, you’ll note that her process is of a decidedly fine art bent.

This is exactly the sort of work I started this blog to showcase and it’s exactly the sort of work I want to be creating as a photographer.

Source: sandratorralba.com