Tag: gesture

Donatas Zazirskas – i (2016)

I featured another of Zazirskas’ images in a post from almost exactly a year ago. (Incidentally: it’s probably the most popular OP in the history of this project.)

I’m still not over 100% on board with his work but I ran across this earlier in the week and I had a very strong reaction to it.

I’ll try to explain but in order to do that I do have to dissimulate–at least initially.

Nothing about this pose makes sense. You’re standing outside wearing a light dress. You bear your left breast while leaving the right covered touch your index and middle fingers to your collar bone while throwing your head back with the back of your palm seeming pressed against your forehead. Why?

The only thing that makes sense is that she’s trying to remain anonymous. As as much as I personally loathe images that decapitate the subject in order to preserve privacy–there is a fundamental contradiction between her pose and the mise en scene, i.e. she’s presented as being unaware of being observed but is also trying not to be seen while self-consciously revealing her breast; all with the background so carefully presented as to vertically bifurcate the frame.

That was my first reaction anyway. Running into it a year later, I’m almost willing to wager that this image is an extrapolation upon Fan Ho’s magnificent Approaching Shadow.

As far as an homage, it’s uneven. But if Zazirskas is actually spending time with Ho’s work then that would explain both my ambivalence about aspects of his work and the fact that I’m not exactly ready to dismiss it either.

Ho is a hell of a lot more formal and technically astute–however, I can’t suggest that it’s the wrong photographer given Zazirskas’ over style. The choice actually strikes me as thoroughly prescient.

Source: flickr.com

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

When ever someone tells me: you write well. I always kind of look around with an expression like: I do?

It’s not that my grammar is atrocious–I made it through to my senior year in high school without ever being taught anything about the mechanics of writing. (My senior AP English teacher tried but eventually gave up and instead taught me how to hear something wrong in a sentence–which doesn’t really help as I am too impatient too go back and read 90% of what I write out loud after I finish it.)

But, writing is actually a painful process for me. I don’t particularly care for it but my soul demands it. What finds its way out onto the paper is usually such a poor approximation of the thoughts I struggle to fit to words.

The reason I mention all this is because for all my awkwardness and social phobias, I’m more comfortable with gestures–specifically using touch as a means of bridging the gaps between words and thought.

A hand placed on an arm in an unpremeditated way can have the effect that stylists will tell you saying the name of the person to whom you are writing can have in fomenting intimacy.

A hug can been domineering, as a means of trying to draw someone out of an emotional morass, and (counter-intuitively) a way of giving yourself permission to let go of someone.

Meeting others who speak this language of–for lack of a better term–gestures, is rare. They are always fighting to convey something of the immense silences of being a person who has lost full access to their first language and instead always fumbles for the almost right words in a faulty second tongue.

I love this .gif because of the way his lips twist at the most sensitive spot. The way the coating of saliva on the cock glistens. But most of all I have the way the stroking hand says all at once: “what you are doing to me feels divine” and “your skin is beautiful and soft” and “every part of you belongs to me”.

:::shivers:::