legs – Page 2 – Acetylene Eyes

staceyelizzabethh:

Source: as best as I can tell these six images were likely gathered and arranged by fulme. (The top-center image seems to predate this assemblage.)

In theory, I am a proponent of bricolage.

However, if you are working digitally, there is very little that isn’t at hand for you to use. To me this muddies the already precarious distinction between ‘formal’ collage and MacGyver free association.

I don’t know how to illustrate it except to point to another image that was making the Tumblr rounds back in early October. It’s a really solid idea but the execution is lame brained–half a grapefruit on a white background super-imposed over what looks like the legs of a model wearing a white one-piece American Apparel swimsuit.

On the other hand, the six images above were carefully selected. The similarity in tonal range and luminosity is striking. Further, the arrangement serves to activate the images in different ways, promoting interplay, building and relieving tension by means of line, color, echoing of shape, conceptual mirror, etc.

Highly astute work deserving of recognition.

Butow Maler – Lena and Extreme (2013)

This appears to be from Maler’s eMagination 05: Porn Art. (A full, lo-res preview is available on Blurb.)

Here: my gaze enters the frame following the baseboards rightward thrust; the reversed symmetry of her left food to his right foot draws my eye away from the deep shadows dominating the left third of the frame; reverse symmetry is emphasized again by the echoed angles of their opposing, correspondent legs.

Upward trajectory is reinforced by the momentum of his taut musculature–sumptuously rendered in B&W–leaning into her body her body at an angle almost perfectly perpendicular to the baseboard approach vector.

In the gap between their bodies, her right breast is framed and balanced against the dizzyingly sharp focus on her left hand transferring her unsupported weight onto his arm, which in turn pulls her center of gravity towards him; the way his arm hiding her face (LOVE); the nearly seamless skin tone merging between the inside of her left knee and his triceps.

Lastly, I notice the wall’s texture. (Look closely, the faintest hint of it recurs in the left third of the frame, differentiating between the strobes vignetting and shadow cast by his body.

For all it’s sophistication, the couple’s pose is unwieldy. Yes, it convey some of the immediacy, the laser-like focus on sensation that can mark the initiation of intimacy. All well and good but this doesn’t square with Maler’s subtitle: Porn Art.

Word order is always telling: art appended to porn. On one level, the implicit claim works: the images demonstrate a solid grasp of craft and familiarity with art conventions. On another level: thought the presentation is consummately ‘artistic’–I find it neither especially arousing nor justified in its pretense to Art.

In effect, it has matters turned the wrong way ’round: it’s one thing to make sexuality the crux of one’s creative output; quite another, to create work from a template of what is considered meritorious–it is possible to make Art that is pornographic (Klimt’ll tell you all about it); Porn Art is not nor will it ever be a ‘real’ thing.

Source: raininjuarez

Kenneth Josephson – Polapan (1973)

First things first: I have gotten flack for the wordiness of my posts. I post what I post because I believe in contribution as a prerequisite for participation in a community. I don’t have much in the way of original content, so I offer what I can: commentary.

I realize that most of you couldn’t give less of a fuck what I think about images. I don’t give fuck one if you discard what I’ve written when you reblog shit from me. That’s cool. No offense taken.

What I can’t abide is deleting attribution. Don’t do it. If you do, you suck shit through a fucking tube.

Case in point, this image was properly credited in the original post. Somewhere along the line, credit was removed.

It may seem like a small thing. But this has come across my dash several times. Seeing it, i’ve thought to myself: self, the blacks look kinda shallow so this is probably an image created through digital means. It has a bit of the picture-in-picture thing happening, maybe a touch of the album-cover-instead-of-a-face trend. In other words, due to my lack of pre-extant familiarity with the work, I end up mistaking it for a copy cat instead of an instigator.

Further, knowing that this was made in 1973 immediately connects it with Duane Michals Things are Queer and sharpens my ‘inspired picture-in-picture’ formulation toward an insinuation of mise en abyme.

And what is particularly interesting to me about mise en abyme and what Michals focuses on is that you can not only travel inward in such images, it is equally possible–and I would argue more interesting–to travel outward.

danish-principle:

foxphotoart

Fox Photo-Art – Glass Olive [from the Voyeurism Series] (2013)

Initially, I see the stone wall and sapling filtered, dappled light. All of it pulls up a step or two short of full blown flashback to strolling around Fort Tryon Park on a summer afternoon.

This feeling motivated me to look into Fox Photo-Art.

Le sigh. What is it with image makers bearing vulpine monikers and their privileged insistence upon producing self-important, creatively stunted dreck and deeming it ‘art’?

Usually, this attitude causes me to dismiss the work in totality; however, it somehow increases my appreciation of the above image even if there’s nothing especially inspired about it.

Yeah, the composition is solid: the angle of the ledge leads the eye to Glass Olive; her body is situated parallel to the focal plane so her legs can remain open toward the camera.

Unlike the more natural, obviously comfortable positioning of her legs, her upper body is rigidly posed in order to facilitate reflection of light from the bright white pages of Margot Mifflin’s Bodies of Subversion onto her face.

To my eye there’s a startlingly nuanced yet fraught conceptualization at work here: using Ms. Olive’s face to establish a counterpoint to the focus on her pubic area.

Glossing over the implications with regard to matters of heteronormative gaze and sexualization/objectification of female bodies, this strategy somewhat succeeds. Although, it should be pointed out this counterpoint unbalances the image; and only works due to the dimensionality contributed by the angle of Ms. Olive’s legs balanced against the essentially decorative negative space occupying the left third of the frame.

I am almost always appreciative of clever framing. But what fascinates me here is the degree to which the subject remains completely indifferent to being seen in spite of all the visual cues pointing to the precision with which the scene has been staged. The most obvious being that no matter how much you fidget, wiggle or kick, even given the audacity of sitting in such a way in a dress sans undergarments, dresses only fall like this as a result of being carefully arranged.

It’s like the Fox Photo-Art can’t decide whether he’s dealing in conventions of public nudity or upskirt shots.

Speaking of the latter: recently, I’ve seen some commendable efforts (like this) to recast an otherwise exploitative genre in a more consent-driven, body positive/sex positive manner.

Igor Mukhin

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If it moves, Igor Mukhin likely shoots it; if it doesn’t, he’ll still take aim.

With nearly 5000 images—split between B&W film scans and Leica AG M9 captures, amassed over 6.5 years—perusing his photostream is like mainlining a hyper-distilled, chaotic mélange of interesting, occasionally ingenious work.

My head doesn’t wrap around such profligate excess easily—limitation is too central a feature in my own process. (Read: I am poor.) But I can let that slide. What I fail to fathom is how Mukhin’s haphazard, throw-it-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks curatorial approach works at all, let alone results in such jaw-dropping examples of all that photography should embody.

(To avoid unnecessary disappointment, skip his staid personal website.)

Source: Flickr / im_foto

Kim Eliot Fung – Phenomenon of Being 2006

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It’s like returning to a location that filled the child-mind with its enormity only to find it suddenly shrunk, like music that once moved you, moving on now without you.

A rule to which there are precious few exceptions.

The disparity between perception and reality has to burn away over time, like morning fog. Perhaps this is what Baudelaire was about when he advised poets to burn anything written before the age of twenty-five if they wanted to be taken seriously.

If you take the idea of poetry literally: what of Rimbaud—who wrote everything he would ever write prior to turning twenty?

What if you define poetry as did Emily Dickinson—and I do—what does this mean for the photo poetry of Francesca Woodman?

What about Kim Eliot Fung who was a teenager when she made this photograph?

I mean there are certainly criticisms that can be made here—adolescent angst, sentimentality. I might even add question with regard to why the model’s head is cut off—though I think the effort of the image has something to do with the spectators gaze and how an awareness of that implication inverts and skews notions of anonymity, gender perception/performance and the politics of visual representation of identity.

Criticisms that the work lacks refinement or is unaccomplished are completely off base. In other words, it suggests a precocious understanding of what maturity entails even if it has not yet fully reached maturation.

This is one of my favorite photographs. Unlike so many things that I return to in time, this does not seem smaller than my memory of it. If anything, the opposite is true: the image itself seems larger, richer and fuller when measured against my memory of it.

It’s my hope that Ms. Fung will return to photography at some point. Until then she makes aprons and curates the always impressive Editor’s Index.

Source: aircrash.deviantart.com

Caroline Mackintosh

selections from Caroline Mackintosh’ Thigh Deep series

This is so how I want to celebrate my birthday this year.

Alas, with two or three exceptions my friends wouldn’t be down for drunken skinny dipping. (And I am way too chicken shit to suggest it as an option.)

Maybe next year. (Probably not though.)

Le sigh.

(Soundtrack suggestion: Oceanic)

Source: nevver

Lina Scheynius’ photographs are above all sincere in their straight-forward simplicity and lack of self-conscious pretense—capturing not only the truth of a moment but something of the initial wonderment which sparked her mind and brought the viewfinder to her eye.

Like many young, internet-famous image makers she works at the interstices of documentary, editorial and erotic photography but her handles the material with a rare prescience.

Take this self-portrait where she appears starkly naked but protectively curled up on a leather couch. She is both seen and unseen.

I cannot help but apply that to her sense of herself as a photographer. She presents the world she sees from behind and through her camera. This is especially interesting given familiarity with her larger body of work as she takes great pains to push her personal boundaries more than her models.

In the minefield resulting from conceptual concerns over the visual representation of sexual identity and body politics, although what Scheynius’ is about is perhaps more instinctive than the collaboration between Traci Matlock and Ashley MacLean, it is no less vital or interesting.

And frankly, there are a lot of photographers who could learn something from this. I am sick unto death with voyeurs hiding behind cameras snapping away as they have models enact their most deeply repressed fantasies. (I am thinking here of an individual who I would rather not name but will give apply the psuedonym Reynard Yale.)

Source: Flickr / linascheynius

youarecordiallyinvitedtopissoff:

Ahndraya Parlato

Blue over green fields and a distant siren sings muted rendition of fire engine red—the world’s colors are so effusive sight often spills into sound.

Black and white photography distills the manifest to its base visual elements: “light, line and form.”

Whereas color photography displays the world more-or-less as it appears. Among the keepers of culture, this begged questions as to the inherent art value of color in photography. What criterion could separate mundane snapshots from carefully considered works of art?

William Eggleston was one of the first to breakthrough this impasse. His use of color worked as a logical extension of his compositions and was anything but incidental.

Today, color is viewed as having equal viability with black and white as a medium for fine art photography. And while this allows photographers to focus on one or the other without recriminations, questions about the purpose of color in photography still linger.

You Are Cordially Invited to Piss Off posted this photograph by Ahndraya Parlato, who fuses a contemplative spirit with edgy surrealist hallucinations on sheets of large format film. The results are goddamn breathtaking even if the work is in color not about it.

The preceding image is a stunning exception: a young woman—framed from midriff to mid-shin—lays splayed on a green lawn flecked with autumnal leaves in a wet red dress; clear water pooling in the fabric between her thighs—a doubtless intended visual innuendo.

There are themes of sexuality as potential, the elemental (earth, fire and water) and I am of a mind that there is an auto-biographical element (every dead leaf in the frame appears specifically placed to me). However, it is impossible to dodge the insistence of the color in any conceptual consideration; the red and green complement one another perfectly, the skin tone, a touch sickly as a result of the hyper-stylized color. Stylization masked by echoing the pooled water with colors approximating the heightened saturation after rainfall on overcast days.

Source: ahndrayaparlato.com