Tag: female nudes

Joanna Szproch – [↖] Title unknown from Sulejow series (201X); [+] Untitled from Personal I series (2013); [↗] Patricia with mosquito, Warsaw, Poland from Sulejow series (2011); [↓] Untitled for Tissue Magazine (2012)

This is the second time Szproch has been featured here.

I’m still head over heels for that photograph. And it’s exciting to see the plethora of new work she’s posted to her portfolio.

Not all of it is too my taste. In fact I’m honestly a bit underwhelmed by the extent to which her commercial work seems to uniformly adapt a Lukasz Wierzbowski affect.

I mean there’s no disputing the quality she delivers–it’s just according to Szproch, her approach is motivated by:

a mixture of vulgarity and innocence, saturated color and dowdiness, high technology and analogue, [the photos &] images are a celebration of contrasts.

That’s an actually an astute observation. However, it raises the issue of whether or not she is perhaps losing some of the force of the work by incorporating such shouted visual trends.

I’ve culled the above images from her more personal projects. And I want to point out how when she cultivates a quieter tone, how it sharpens the ambiguity and constrasts within the work.

Let’s start with top-right image. The light is most likely from some sort of canned lighting to the right of the camera–some of the color is getting bleached out in order to provide a nice right-to-left light-to-dark grade is preserved. It doesn’t pop like the still life to the left or the luminous and surreal image on the top left.

Now consider the dates the pictures were made: Patricia with mosquito dates from 2011, Untitled from the Personal I series is more recent by 2 years and I’d wager that Title unknown from the Sulejow series is likely the most recently created of the work posted here.

It’s too easy to overlook the way that form and content interpenetrate in the quieter work. Patricia with mosquito is painterly and connected to the tradition of oil painting until you realized that all the elements are rigorously ordered around the mosquito’s presence–and the implications of that a suggestion of fecundity as an invitation to parasitism.

With the still life the compression of both highlight and shadows both makes the color seem aqueous, as if it is both radiating off the fruits and vegetables–the lushness against the blacks and greys possesses an extravagant superfluity that I can only think to describe as erotic.

In the top-rightmost picture the shape of the woman’s body, her pre-orgasmic expression and the way her dress spreads out behind her but her head hangs, while the strain of her posture–there’s no way that position doesn’t hurt to hold; all point to a dichotomy between the beauty of nature and the way that such beauty is never that far removed from something that will soil the skin if it’s touched.

But I really love the sensitivity of the B&W image the most. The way she’s choosing to ignore how she sees herself and focus her attention on the camera and the way the downy hair on her arm is all standing on end along the left edge of her arm and the way you can see the reflection of her clothes which she holds balled up protectively against her stomach–it’s a devastating indictment of the art historical male gaze that instead of supposing an equal and alternative female gaze, demonstrates how given any degree of agency the subject can by merely reacting instinctively to a scenario can upend that entire paradigm.

Nicolás Uribe – Sunday Conversation (2008)

I really love this guy’s work.

But this one in particular has a lot of meaning for me.

My life has been a living hell for the last five months. My partner is dependent, at least, in all likelihood addicted to pain killers. She’s fine as long as she can get pills but when she can’t she becomes profoundly emotionally abusive, manipulative and suicidal.

For the longest time, she was the only person who wanted me and more than that wanted to be with me. But at the end of May last year, I went out to the Bay Area for the first time and spent 48 hours with my friend Amadine (not her real name).

It was maybe the best 48 hours of my entire life. I have only ever felt so completely connected with one other person in my life.

Anyway, the first night I was with her we ate edibles together and sat on the couch in her living room talking. As those of you in California already know, the CA medical edibles tend to come in a bit higher in THC concentration than they are advertised. For example: at that point I was consuming around 35mgs on a two days on-one day off rotation. I ate something like 65mgs that night and I’ve only been that stoned maybe three other times in my life.

Amadine was outline three projects she wants to work on, one involving animation.

Unlike this painting, we were fully clothed. In fact, her partner was in the other room. We also were not sitting side-by-side. She was sitting with her back against the arm of the couch, with her legs crossed, her knee touching my thigh.

The only light in the room was a lamp on Amadine’s desk–her desk being in a recessed work space divided off from the main room by one of those antique dividers with the carved wooden arabesques. As my eyes scanned between her eyes and the room–I have trouble with eye contact and while that trouble is almost non-existent with her, I had to keep shifting my gaze because the urge to lean forward and kiss her was so overwhelming.

The light through the carved gaps seemed like it was rotoscoped, it kept undulating and shifting slightly distracting me. Amadine stopped talking and we just sat there looking at each other for what felt like five minutes. She finally giggled and smiling broadly said, wow, yo, that was super intense.

It’s taken a while but we’ve finally gotten around to talking about our experiences of that weekend. And it turns out that we are both insanely attracted to each other but that due to a number of factors in her world right now it’s not something that those feelings aren’t something that can be acted upon just yet.

So yeah, this painting perfectly captures the feeling of sharing space and time with a dear friend that I love and am devastatingly attracted to…

It’s probably not realistic and I know we won’t hook up when I see her again next month, but I stupidly have in mind that we might be able to share space again like before, perhaps more inline with this painting. (We both have a pronounced nudist streak, so it’s not impossible even if it is unlikely.)

Source: erosart

Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Anina Silk and Joy (2010)

I’m not 100% on the attribution here but I’m pretty sure the year and performers are correct. (If anyone knows where they real clip originates, I’d be interested in seeing it actually.)

Ass play isn’t really my thing. It can absolutely shorten the length of time it takes me to climax and it changes my awareness of what muscles do what when I’m orgasming. Neither of those things really add anything to the experience for me.

If my partner is into it, I’m willing to experiment just so long as my partners mouth as well as my mouth don’t go anywhere near an anus or anything that’s been inserted into an anus. (I know everyone on Tumblr swears about how wonderful analingus is to give and receive, but yeah… no thank you.)

Thus, it’s a little odd that I’m including this in some ways–considering it’s ostensibly a warm up for anal fisting. The reason I like it is two-fold.

First, it reminds me of being five. I had a friend in my neighborhood named Dirk (not his real name but his real name was also disturbingly phallic in hindsight).

Dirk liked to play a game called ‘butt work’. One person would pull down their pants and lay face down on the ground the other person would pull the cheeks of the butt apart and look at, blow on, tickle or insert a finger into the other’s rectum.

I liked the shameless curiosity of it. The experimentation involved.

It was also turn based. I’d lay there hidden from view of the adult world by bushes while someone probed my body. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing but I knew there’d be a chance for me to be equally curious about their body if I was patient.

It’s that sort of I won’t ask you to let me do anything to you that you also wouldn’t ask me to do to you mentality that appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Although I would also like to make porn at some point, I’m currently interested in pushing my personal photographic work in a more erotic direction. But I am patently uncomfortable with asking anyone to do something unless there’s some sort of mutuality to it. I have zero interest in pursuing anything exploitative.

I’ve not made much progress on figuring it out. But I did want to point to the mutuality that radiates from this image and to point to that feeling as something I’d like to learn how to encourage and foster in my own work.

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

The eye moves left to right over this frame; the action flows in the opposite direction (right to left)–like walking into the ocean when the tide is pushing in against the land; or, as if the arrow were pushing itself against the bowstring of its own accord–seeking that perfect tension wherein it can only be loosed free and true on target.

baohienngo:

baohienngo:

if you haven’t gone swimming naked in a freezing cold stream in the canadian wilderness i really recommend it and it was one of the most surreal moments of my entire life ❤

this lil outing was probably one of my favorite moments of 2016. i miss my montreal friends ❤

Baohien Ngo – Untitled (2016)

This post is guest curated by @suspendedinlight.

It’s really hard to pick favourites when it comes to Bao’s work. I
really love that these have the signature hazy glow, like a daydream of
what summer could be or has been. I think what draws me to this set is
the impression that
her subjects are care-free. They feel candid, and the distance between
the lens and the subjects adds to the feeling of having freedom and
space to be. There are an abundance of photos with similar ingredients
(groups of nude women by the water) but the results
here don’t call to mind nymphs, sirens, or mermaids. In short, no
male-gaze-y bullshit. 

Source: baohienngo