Teenager in action – Machen wir es mit Musik (1982)

Every once in a while I see a configuration of bodies in porn that strikes me as especially visually dynamic. This is one such example.

I’m not wild about the rest of it but the pose is nice. And it gets me brain spinning up about the tension between explication and implication, esp. in porn.

I mean this would be more visually arresting with more varied, naturalistic lighting. The dead white door as backdrop is a total non-starter.

But even as great as the position is, I kind of wonder if it wouldn’t be better if her right hand was braced against his chest with her fingers splayed. If it was in the center of his chest, then it would block the line of sight with the cleft of her backside (which is something a pornographer would feel was important visual information to include in the picture). On the other hand, it would almost certainly be more implicitly intriguing if her hand were pressed against his chest over his heart and she was squeezing her right nipple between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand.

Also: (and this is being super OCD about things) seeing her left leg at least enough of a hint of it to suggest it’s position would contribute something as well. There are two strategies that could be applied to allow for that. Her left knee could be brought up just enough to replicate the V of his thighs. Or, she could fully straddle his right thigh. This latter option would be more compelling from the standpoint of dimensionality–however, it would also further complicate the positioning of the hands.

Anyway, the above picture comes from @musorka‘s blog. And I’ve said it before but it bears repeating. The sheer quantity of work posted over there on the daily is mind-boggling to me. The quality isn’t always there but there are definitely some real gems mixed in with all the dreck. (And remember, engaging with the dreck isn’t without value. Thinking about what works, what doesn’t and what you would do differently if given the chance is actually a valuable exercise for your creative brain. After all, invariably when you’re making something you get to a point where you feel like you’ve screwed it all up and you have to find a way to keep going and to fix it.)

Source: musorka

Author unknown – Michele ist gut für zwei (1980)

I stumbled onto @musorka‘s retro pornography motherlode for the first time roughly a month ago.

As best as I can tell he mines scans from another site and posts them to Tumblr. The volume is astounding, the quality frequently dubious. But there are some real gems if you’re willing to put in some time.

For example: if you can ignore the obnoxiously coded depiction of cunnilingus, the above is actually compellingly staged. The action is cheated towards the camera but in a fashion that sans the aforementioned awkward protruding tongue, would be something that would be easy to overlook. (In fact, I would freaking LOVE to recreate this as a fine art image.)

However, there’s actually an even more overriding reason I’m posting this on the first day of the New Year. I’m the sort of sap who makes scads of resolutions each and every year. For the last 5 years, I’ve made goals with the form of shoot X number rolls of film each month; add Y number of new photos to my portfolio by EOY.

2016 was a garbage year but excluding my goal of reading 45 books (on which I failed miserably), I did better than I ever have in any previous year–successfully completing a little more than half my resolutions.

Yet, I think my focus on completing my resolutions actually ended up causing me to post work that I don’t–in hindsight–believe to be as good as it should’ve been.

This year, I’m trying to leaven my urge to hold myself accountable for doing instead of sitting around and thinking about doing or worse trying to do. I keep thinking about Helen Levitt’s statement that photographers can talk about what they want to do or equivocating about the conceptual or whatever but unless you’re running film through the camera, you are not doing fuck all.

There’s also this story of a reporter interviewing Levitt in her apartment:

When I was in her apartment, I saw boxes of prints
stacked up. One was labeled simply nothing good. Another one was
marked here and there.

“That’s the beginning of another book,” she said about the box.

“Can I take a peek?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “‘Cause I’m unsure about it. If I was sure that they were worth anything, I’d show it to you. But I can’t.”

Well, she must have decided they were worth something. That book, Here and There, came out a few years later.

One of my biggest gripes about digital imaging–despite everything about the way it looks–is that it allows you to proceed uncritically. You aren’t limited by how many exposures you have. You’re limited by battery life and the size of your memory card, nothing more. What tends to follow–almost as a matter of course–is this spray and pray approach or worse a we’ll just fix it in post mentality.

Looking through musorka’s Tumblr, it strikes me that there is an argument for volume. Not in the making of good images, necessarily but in learning to use the work that went into failed images to channel into making images that succeed.

There are so many awkward expression in European porn from the late 70s and early 80s. And I’m not for a second suggesting any of these images reach the heights of lower case a art, but given that it’s porn and so much of it is godawful, the good stands out even more obviously. Let me show you.

This works for many of the same reasons this does but mostly due to simplicity.

There’s something meditated and in the moment about this one.

I have a paraphilia for braids but I also like the lower image here because of the way it’s explicit without being at all graphic. ❤

The expression in the top panel and the lighting in the lower panel on this one are both unfeigned and luminous.

This is entirely awkward except for the way his expression in the context of the way she’s guiding him creates what could perhaps be termed a ‘feminist’ porn image.

The expression of the woman with the bangs at the right is effing priceless.

No qualifications needed–these three images are all excellent.

And lastly–another example of cheating towards the camera without being obvious about it.

Katya Clover – Title Unknown (2016)

I’m of two minds about this image. It gets me painfully hot and bothered. So it at least has that going for it. The trouble is it’s a garbage image.

There’s no sort of compositional logic. It’s #skinnyframebullshit. There’s no rule of thirds, no golden mean; it’s merely the camera turned on its side as a means of most easily fitting the most information pertaining to Clover into the frame and (also the slimming effect that a vertical frame can impose.)

What makes the image attention grabbing is the super saturated skin tone, magental of the blanket and organ of the carrot against the bland straw and blah sky. (This is about as first rate an example I’ve ever seen of how faithful rendition of color does not guarantee a good image.)

I do like the concept–quite a lot, in fact. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Further, I love the giant wet spot on the blanket. If we knew a bit more about where she was, the image might be improved. Is she near a garden? Is that where the zucchini and the carrot came from? But there’s not enough of an indication to go anywhere with these questions. (Another short coming of the image.)

I’m not sure her pose works. It’s a little awkward but it does at least seam to be in service of what she’s doing. (I adore her expression.) Even though it is interesting, in that I feel most images like this would go for an angle more aligned with a straight on view of her vulva and anus. I always tell people that one can absolutely include graphic depictions of vulvas in one’s work, but if one want to know a general real for what’s objectifying vs what’s depiction, imagine the vulva is an eye lid, if the eye opens and is looking straight ahead is it making eye contact with the viewer? If so, there’s a good chance the image will end up being objectifying unless a good bit of other work is put in to avoid it.

Looking at this I’ve realized another thing about the difficult in using masturbation as a subject for art. It’s really a question of visual depiction of an experience versus staging the experience for a voyeur and by extension–due to the unfortunate white cishet male history of art–the male gaze.

If I can find someone interested in posing for it, I would actually very much like to reinterpret this concept as a fine art photograph–’cause I think there’s that sort of potential to the concept.

Being whole

therealkatiewest:

I am not just one thing. I cannot simply be a wife. Or a teacher. Or a photographer. Or a student. I am all of these things and when people expect me to only be one of those things, they are expecting me to stop being a whole person.

Remember when you were in middle school and you thought your teachers lived at the school and whenever you saw them anywhere that was decidedly not at school, you were shocked and kind of couldn’t fathom that your teachers were actually whole people? Who did stuff? That wasn’t teaching? What a disservice we did our teachers. Or how about remember when we were extremely rude to the McDonald’s cashier because they were the McDonald’s cashier and there were pickles on our burger when we specifically asked for no pickles and we forgot that that McDonald’s cashier was also a son, and a writer, and a student, and a boyfriend, and a hero to his younger sister?

It seems like such a simple thing to not expect people to only be one thing. And it’s strange because people simultaneously tell us to have varied interests and facets of ourselves while expecting us to be just one thing. If we are just a teacher, then we are easier to ignore. If we are just a McDonald’s cashier, then we are easier to treat badly. If we are just a woman, then we are easier to pass over. For example.

If your students see you working at The Keg, laugh because lord knows (and now they do too) that you can’t afford your mortgage on a teacher’s salary. If that jerk is rude to you because pickles were mistakenly placed on her burger, laugh because you know your sister made you a cape last weekend and it’s likely no one ever made this jerk a cape. If your boss is surprised that you are a painter, or your grandma thinks you shouldn’t vacation without your wife, or your teammates scoff when you tell them you write comics, or your boyfriend doesn’t like that you model for erotic photographers, laugh because you know you can’t be only one thing and it is RIDICULOUS for anyone to ever believe that you could be.

Sure, life might be easier if we hid most parts of ourselves to give the impression that we were only one thing, but fuck that. I would much rather be a whole person and have a life with potentially more difficulties, than pretend I am only one thing so I can be miserable in a slightly easier life. And hopefully the more people who see that we are whole people–that it is totally possible for us to be both musicians and bankers, artists and baseball players, sound engineers and baristas, tattoo artists and secretaries, data analysts and sci-fi writers, teachers and naked on the internet, photographers and taxi drivers, parole officers and inventors, vet technicians and fetish models–the more people who realize this possibility because more people are refusing to be simply one thing, the goddamn better.

Don’t ever let someone make you feel like you can only be one thing. Fuck that. Be everything.