Tag: male nude

Tor Larsson – Fifteen 15 (1974)

I have no idea what the story is with with these images. (I very much want to know more/everything about them–so if you know anything, please share.)

I have half a mind to use them a prophylaxis against Clark and McGinley’s youth and beauty. And, I mean–yes, the above photograph is #skinnyframebullshit and not especially technically accomplished, but, at least, it embraces what it’s ostensibly about contrasted with Clark and McGinley’s constant equivocation. It’s like I always feel with maybe not as much Clark but McGinley feels like this sort of fragile fairy tale that will wilt or collapse under too much scrutiny.

I mean… maybe it’s just me–after all I was raised in an insanely regressive Evangelical environment but the stories my non-Xtian friends tell about discovering their sexuality are a great deal less curated.

Everything about this feels if not authentic then perhaps at least grounded. There’s a playfulness that serves as a sort of lubricant against what would otherwise been an arousal killing gravitas. I love the way that her sticking her tongue out conveys both a mugging for the camera–which actually de-emphasizes the way her legs are spread for the camera to get an unobstructed view of her vulva; but it also teases the implication of oral sex. (Also, I really dig that you can see the reflection of the edge of the tub in her hippie glasses.)

I don’t know. Unlike Mcginley, these resonate with me not because of some sort of false nostalgia–a wish for an experience so rarefied it might as well not exist. Instead, it reminds me of dear friends who have told me about how your best friend was someone who not only knew you masturbated but would lay side by side without under the covers masturbating, racing to see which of you would orgasm first. (Contrary to my own experience where sex was dirty and solely for the purpose of procreation.)

Also, I really–in a way I cannot clearly articulate–respond to the woman in the shorts and shirt. The way she’s participating in the intimacy but not the physicality.

Source: oldalbum

lusting-and-thrusting:

Samantha-fucking-Saint

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

After my first encounters with porn, I rapidly developed a abusive relationship with it. Namely, my curiosity regarding it always seemed to outweigh the loathing and alienation it triggered.

There was a local video rental chain with a location within walking distance of my house. After some cautious prodding, I realized that several of the staff members didn’t give fuck one when it came to determining whether or not I was old enough to rent items from their enormous back room.

Thus by the time I was sixteen I was renting two or three XXX videos a month.

Amazingly, I found some stuff that if I didn’t necessarily like, it certainly interested me. In particular, a gonzo series called New Faces, Hot Bodies–made by, if memory serves a Cleveland based kink smut purveyor named Bob Bright–never failed to pique my interest.

As I remember it was the diversity of the scenes that fascinated me. In any one tape, there would be a range of scenes from vanilla to hardcore and bizarre kink fetish.

I believe a testament to how different they were is that I can still vividly remember a number of scenes from the series. One was my first introduction to bukkake–in the scene five to eight studs ejaculated at least 3 times a piece over a young woman while two other women used spoons to collect the semen off her body so as to feed it to her.

In another scene in the first video I from the series I ever viewed, there was a parenthetical return to the first scene. The lead in said something like fifteen minutes after we last saw them and then the couple went for round two.

I found the second scene unbelievably hot. It didn’t matter that it had likely been filmed on two separate days. The imposed continuity and the notion that the scene didn’t end just because the guy blew his load really turned me on.

…

It was another five or so years before I saw anything similar. It was one of those videos that makes you feel a little uncomfortable watching. Low production values, with most of the shooting budget going to acquire a superficially opulent location and then the performers being paid in drugs.

The performers were clearly coked out of their brains. The guy was fucking like a spastic jack hammer. He pulls out, ejaculates so forcefully the first two spurts shoot over the woman’s head and end up on the carpet. He immediately starts rubbing his glans around the woman’s clitoris, while a small puddle of come leaks out of his cock and then he promptly reinserts and continues as if he’s just getting going.

…

All this is by way of saying I like deviations from the straight cisgendered heteronormative porn script. For example, in the image above it’s clear that guy has already ejaculated forcefully on the woman–who the captions say is Samantha Saint but I remain unconvinced of that attribution; yet, the scene clearly continues while he ensures that she gets off.

Yes, the notion that sex has to result in orgasm for both parties is also fundamentally heteronormative but it’s one of those things that although micro-ly problematic, still–for me at least–represents a decided improvement on the status quo.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

Another thing I don’t like about most porn is that even when they don’t cut to extreme close-ups of what’s going on at the site of various erogenous zones, they position the camera in such a way as to maximize the unobstructed view. It always feels annoyingly gratuitous. (I’m probably an anomaly but I am far FAR more likely to masturbate along to something like say this than this.)

Although I’m really not into the down tilt in this and how it renders the verticals diagonal instead of straight up and down. I don’t feel the angle was chosen to provide a titillating view of the one participants genitals and anus. Instead the view seems chosen to convey the most coherent information about both the space and what is happening within the space. The explicit nudity just happens to be a bonus.

Source: refer.ccbill.com

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

There is no end to the way the marketing of pornography as if it’s an a la carte menu alienates me.

It’s like there’s the default menu–straight, heterosexual and cisgendered. Solo, oral, anal, gonzo, creampie, teen, milf.

The gay porn that I’ve seen benefits from it seeming as if the dudes really, super actually want to be fucking each other. Sorry not sorry; thirst is hot, y’all.

Lesbian porn that is of a for us by us sort of bent is unquestionably my preference.

But I just don’t understand the segregation of menus. Like, can we get porn where one scene is your typical Vivid-esque cis-het, blowjob, vaginal penetration, rough anal sex followed by facial money shot and the next scene is army guys hazing the new recruits in the barrack’s showers. You don’t have to watch it if that’s not your thing. But I think being confronted with things that aren’t particularly what get you hot and bothered serves to normalize them as valid expressions of human sexuality.

I don’t know where these images are from. My guess is that their probably from one of those cliche reluctant bi- productions–where there’s an element of forcing someone to do something they don’t especially want to do.

I’m super put off by that for many of the reasons most mainstream porn makes me feel like I need to take a dozen scalding showers. Like where are all FFM threesomes depicted so that the ladies get it on with each other and the stud but almost all FMM porn involves the studs high fiving over the woman they are penetrating from either side. Like seriously, if there was a possibility that every now and then the woman in an FMM would say to the dudes, you don’t get to touch me until I see you suck each others’ cocks, I’d watch a hell of a lot more porn.

Sandra Torralba – [↑] Estranged Sex 4 (2008); [←] Estranged Sex 8 (2009); [→] Estranged Sex 12 (2009); [↓] Estranged Sex 2 (2008)

I love these so effing much I can’t even…

It’s partly the pathos–the simultaneous ravenous curiosity and trepidation that comes along with exploring the boundaries of your sexuality as an adolescent, the libidinal asymmetry that touches all relationship, the fine line between performing your sexuality in public and the need to restrain or privatize the sexual as it pertains to your family and television as active incitement to participate voyeuristically with the sexual performance of strangers.

I’m not quite sure these qualify as capital A Art, the process that goes into making these images is reminiscent of Gregory Crewdson–about whom I make no secrets to the fact that I think his work is heinous excrement not even deserving of inclusion in discussions of lower case a art; but if you spend any time perusing Torralba’s blog, you’ll note that her process is of a decidedly fine art bent.

This is exactly the sort of work I started this blog to showcase and it’s exactly the sort of work I want to be creating as a photographer.

Source: sandratorralba.com

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

I guess this technically qualifies as post-orgasm torture.

I’m not super fond of the term. It’s not that I object to so-aggressive-it-could-be-deemed-brutal stimulation after orgasm–it can be a damn near transcendent experience.

This is less vigorous, more focused stimulation which acknowledges the fact that after the initial forceful spasms of pleasure, the genitals become hyper-sensitive. The body is hard wired to interpret continued stimulation as pain even though it’s not.

The way I describe it is image a medium sized river with levees on either side to handle flood tides. Orgasm swells the river to it’s edges. Continued stimulation causes the water to rise over the banks and fill the levee. Too much pleasure, at first, is experienced like pain. But it’s not. And if you don’t always have to be in control and trust your partner(s), you can let go and drift in the waves of something unspeakably blissful.

For example: in that last frame, those shaking legs and abdominal contractions are completely involuntary. If you’ve ever experienced that feeling, you’ll understand why I’m obsessed with it. It’s amazing and I crave it.

Alas, just as being tickled isn’t something you can do to yourself, this is the same. And I remain broken and irrevocably unwanted and alone.

I guess at least I can experience a fleeting tinge of it via this gif set.

Source: homobeing

M▲NU

– Untitled (2012)

This image doesn’t quite work. The swath of light falling across the back and the hard shadow cast by his hair, shoulder and arched back is freaking gorgeous.

This is digital, so assuming a RAW file (which if you are shooting digital and not shooting RAW, then like why bother), there’s definitely going to be enough detail of the reflection in that globe to pull out details in order to evoke a better picture of the room (a la Escher’s famous self-portrait).

And the lighting is weird. The highlight by his left hip is probably, what 5 stops over. The pool over his right shoulder 3 stops. You’re getting bounce back from that pool onto the surface of the desk and light ostensibly reflecting off the floor is spilling around under the desk.

Further, I really don’t understand the two objects choice–compositionally an odd # of things is almost always preferable; I think the left hand that you can see curled under the right side is supposed to balance this. It doesn’t and wouldn’t even if it was more apparent. It would need to be holding something.

Thus, there either needed to be a third object, the plant needs to move from his left side to his right or that black drape behind the globe light needs to be removed. Actually, any way you slice it that black drape–although it does extend the dynamic range of the image–adds zilch to the proceedings.

Source: Flickr / anilox

Joymii – What a Ride featuring Josephine and Den (2015)

There are a raft of reasons I ought not be posting this:

  • I am suspicious–at best–of close-ups (let alone extreme close-ups such as this)
  • It’s heteronormative in a way which really goddamned irks me
  • The above image has been cropped from the original (which I would’ve posted if it didn’t feature an intensely intrusive, dumb watermark).

All that BS aside, there is something not if not exactly substantive then I guess ‘considered’ about this. I don’t mean the polished gloss of it–although it certain supersedes that of quotidian porn.

What catches my eye is the extremely shallow depth of field–which allows both out of focus bits in the foreground and background.

Image makers are frequently obsessed with the flattering effects of so-called bokeh to isolate and emphasize the subject of the composition. But bokeh centers on rendering the background out of focus. Out of focus elements in the both the fore- and back- ground is more commonly associated with cinema–where due to the scene playing out of thousands of frames shifting focus can be used to guide who or what within the frame the audience is supposed to attend to. (I’ve written about this before.)

In the above image the point of sharpest focus draws attention to the act of genital penetration. In this crop, the action still manages to be ever-so-slightly off-center. No matter how pretty the soft focus, the image would’ve crumbled given knee-jerk dead center placement.

What’s interesting is in the uncropped version, everything shifts left and down. It’s a better frame by miles but I don’t think I’d have necessarily realized what I have about the image and why it appeals to me without comparing the crop and the original–although not strictly compliant, there are absolutely points of correlation with the composition and the Golden Ratio. (I recommend opening the diagram and the original side by side.)

Source: btgated

Peter Hujar – Bruce de Sainte Croix Triptych (1976)

The central image here served as my introduction to Hujar’s work. (I posted about it 2.5 years ago–misattributing the subject and excerpting just the one image from the grouping.) But, I recently discovered that I was familiar with another of his photos well ahead of that–probably the photo most commonly associated with Susan Sontag was made by him.)

I keep coming back to his work, though. I guess the reason I do is due to his patently even handed approach to all subjects. From portraiture, to landscapes to erotica, he invariably affords his subjects a calm dignity which more often than not edges over into a flash of stubborn pride.

As if in the mid-to-late 70s and big bad eighties in Manhattan with the specter of HIV and AIDS stalking the gay community, there was a camaraderie and joie de vivre that you just don’t really ever see. (And to be clear, I have no intention of romanticizing. It just strikes me that the romanticization of much of the work emanating from the downtown scene possesses an openness an candor that was bred as a result of surviving, the creation of which was clear eyed and unpretentious and for those who didn’t live through those years in that climate read as charmed in a way that was never intended by the creators.)

His tone and frank presentation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ subject matter with the same, quietly incisive approach are things I would very much like to achieve in my own work.

Source: peterhujararchive.com