Tag: monochrome

Mutsumi Yamamoto – Untitled from L’Eros Sacre (2010)


Death, The Last Visit
By Marie Howe

Hearing a low growl in your throat, you’ll know that it’s started.
It has nothing to ask you. It has only something to say, and
it will speak in your own tongue.

Locking its arms around you, it will hold you as long
as you ever wanted.
Only this time it will be long enough. It will not let go.
Burying your face in its dark shoulder, you’ll smell mud and hair
and water.

You’ll taste your mother’s sour nipple, your favorite salty cock
and swallow a word you thought you’d spit out once and be done with.
Through half-closed eyes you’ll see that its shadow looks like yours,

a perfect fit. You could weep with gratefulness. It will take you
as you like it best, hard and fast as a slap across your face,
or so sweet and slow you’ll scream give it to me give it to me
until it does.

Nothing will ever reach this deep. Nothing will ever clench this hard.
At last (the little girls are clapping, shouting) someone has pulled
the drawstring of your gym bag closed enough and tight. At last

someone has knotted the lace of your shoe so it won’t ever
come undone.
Even as you turn into it, even as you begin to feel yourself stop,
you’ll whistle with amazement between your residual teeth oh jesus

oh sweetheart, oh holy mother, nothing nothing nothing ever felt
this good.

Laurent Benaim – Title Unknown (20XX)

This is an ambitious photo. Nine people–five men, two women and two others of indeterminate gender beyond the frame edge boundary–focused on pleasing one woman.

There are two prominent compositional strategies working here:

First, the image can essentially be divided along a diagonal axis (lower left to upper right); this renders a dark side (upper left) and light side (lower right); within this there is, of course, a sort of yin and yang where light portions in the dark half and vice versa more or less balance each other out.

Second, since any three non-co-linear points can form a vertices of a triangle, heads–and to a lesser extent limbs–imply suggested re-framings.

You’ll note that these implicit triangles favor directing the viewers gaze to what’s happening between her legs as opposed to emphasizing the expression on her face–which appears strangely resigned to the proceedings.

I almost want to give credit for effort seeing as how within this triangulation there is a calculated inversion of the light and dark that over-arches the composition–the dark hair vs bright faces and how this shuttles the gaze around the photo.

However, the angular dynamics are undercut by the fact that the frame is essentially centered on the woman’s crotch. (A slightly wider angle of view or a shift in frame that centered on either the woman kissing her left thigh or her right knee would make this more logical consistent.)

Yet, despite the fact that looking at this too long makes my pubococcygeus muscle clench because of the visual overstimulation, I do really like that fact that although this is explicit, it isn’t graphic; there is no visible private bits.

And I do really love the way the woman in the upper half of the frame has latched onto the main woman’s nipple while just to her left someone out of frame has the main woman’s wrist pinned to the floor.

Source: laurentbenaim

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

Given that this looks as if it perpetuates the extraordinarily problematic trope in hentai where consent is gained through sexual coercion, I am probably guilty of bad faith by posting it.

But… :::avoiding eye contact::: I’m not sure how but independent of context this depicts not only something uncomfortably close to what I experience both physically and emotionally when someone brings me to orgasm, it also conveys what I feel when I bring my partner to orgasm.

The fact that they are both women that present varying degrees of femme-ness is crucial. As is the fact that the third woman down the alley has been alerted to their actions. I think I probably could explain why the third party contributes to the concreteness of this feeling, but I’m not sure if perhaps that’s maybe too personal for this venue. (Those of you who’ve been following for a while can probably venture some prescient guesses though…)

Robert Weissner – Bree Addams (2013)

As it is, the framing functions. The desk more or less echoes Ms. Addams knees; the window edge starts a wee bit shy of the first vertical third but the vertical blinds and radiant light not only accentuate her form it contributes an implicit leftward momentum to the image.

Her weight is supported by her right arm and foot–her left leg shifts behind the other at the knee, her left hand is extended only for the sake of balance. It’s interesting because this posture suggests between her arms and torso a form close enough to round up to an equilateral triangle–drawing attention to her breasts (exquisitely semi-silhouetted behind sheer fabric), reiterating the shape of her pubic hair. .

With only this image to go on, I’d be pretty excited about digging in to the image maker’s other work. Alas, I think the praise here needs to go to Ms. Addams.

Don’t get me wrong, Weissner isn’t half-bad. He’s got enough technical chops to give his work a faux art sheen. The trouble is: he seems to see himself as a Dan Smith when his work is inline with the ‘art’ as a pretext for sating voyeurism of someone like Fox Photo-Art.

Credit where it’s due: technical acumen is nothing to sneeze at and this is one image is lovely and I certainly prefer Weissner to Fox Photo-Art’s rubbish. Unfortunately, there is so little distinguishing their work from each other or the scads of other female-nudes-all-day-every-day-because-I-own-a-dSLR-and-can-afford-to-hire-beautiful-models that I just have to shake my head and close another tab.