Tag: fence

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

Sergey Chilikov – From Old Samara cycle (2003)

Two days before departing to Europe, Igor Mukhin posted a digital copy of the flier for a show on at the Schilit Publishing Gallery in Amsterdam.

Of course I had to go–although saying the gallery is in Amsterdam is only true on a technicality. It’s nearly in the suburbs and getting there was interesting on a number of fronts not the least of which was I had to make a private appointment because the gallery hours did not match up with my extremely limited availability during my time in Amsterdam.

From what I gathered, Schilit Publishing is a husband and wife team who work out of their home–which serves as the gallery. This was the first show in which work was displayed throughout the entire house and thus the Russian House exhibition title.

In at least half a dozen ways, I was doomed to dig it. There’s some facet of Russian and Eastern European work that just instinctively appeals to my sensibilities. And really the quality of the work on display was excellent. (I don’t think the work necessarily sat next to other work especially well and I’d aggressively dispute several of the curatorial decisions guiding the installation, but that’s a different story.)

The disappointment turned out to be Mukhin’s work–and it wasn’t a disappointment. (The man is a fucking genius or rare proportions.) It’s just that the focus was more his early street photography and less on his more recent fixation on the transgressiveness of Moscow’s youth culture.) His early work bears an unexpected and EXTREMELY pronounced Cartier-Bresson inflection. (I don’t necessarily consider that a good thing, mind you.) But it’s interesting to see the fight between his instincts of what makes a good image and his exacting approach to form.

But this post is ostensibly about Chilikov–who I was only passingly familiar with before this visit–his prints were just gorgeous. His compositions tend to be chaotic, but he uses the color as a means of parsing the image for the viewer to more easily understand.

For example: here, the attention to skintone and the hint of green in the fence and the very careful rendering of red in the background diminish the mess in the mid-ground.