Tag: monochrome

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

Writing for this project, I frequently feel like my primary form of interacting with images is a this-isn’t-a-good-photo/image-but…

I mean beyond my generalized feeling that I am a bit of a broken record sometimes, this this is something about which I’m always very self-conscious.

But…

I mean I think one of the disservices we do in teaching photography (or, hell, more broadly any creative discipline) is that there’s a laser-like focus on the canonical.

It’s not that I don’t think that shit is important. It absolutely is–indispensable, in fact.

But…

It’s all sort of incestuous–in a biblical sense: the genealogies of influence flow in a clear, unbroken fashion back through history. It’s clean and full-up-to-the-gills with masterpieces of unadulterated genius.

So what’s the downside? I mean if one is trying to learn, the presumption is that one wants to learn from the best. Unfortunately, in my experience this has a limiting effect in a number of ways. If I study only greatness and my own work isn’t great (yet) then I either to be a total asshole narcissist or suffer from a certain degree of oblivion. (After all, when comparing your work with canonical masterpieces, your work begins at a stupendous disadvantage. And that disadvantage can cause you to lean on the work that’s already been done (I know so many emerging artists who view certain artists in such an uncritical light, that it’s almost as if their relationship with the work is less hippie looking to expand their mind and more blasted addict chasing the next crest.)

Truthfully, I’ve learned just as much from perusing shitty work as I have from obsessing over the greats. And it’s for that reason that I think every serious photographer should make a point to critically interrogate bad work in the same fashion they do good work.

I mean the above is not a good image. It’s been blown up far beyond the point of disintegration. It’s blotchy and ugly. Yet, even if I knew where it originated, the original is probably not that much better. Unless you’re going to go to the trouble of setting up highly precise, orchestrated lighting–or you’re one of those lucky shits with a bathroom that has a window (and therefore: some natural light)–then the light is going to look like shite.

Despite looking awful, this does do a number of things extraordinarily well. First, according to the letter of Instagram law, this is an image that is Instagram safe. (Though, I’ll admit it would probably be taken down.)

Whether or not the intention of the author was such is immaterial–and given how bad the image is, it’s unlikely that the motivations approached anything like I am about to suggest: but it doesn’t matter because if the images reads a particular way, it reads a particular way.

It reminds me of the line teachers always used to throw around to my classmates about dressing in a fashion to leave something to the imagination. the idea was you’ll be more attractive/alluring if you show off less instead of more. (The creepy implication being that how you dress is an open invitation for others to imagine things about your body.)

The same mentality is frequently utilized in distinguishing porn from erotica and erotica from art. Porn tends to leave little to the imagination; whereas erotica is somewhere closer to the middle and art allows for the assumption of chastity.

For the record, I’ve always instinctively objected to this framework. I think it’s all a great deal more muddy (and therefore more interesting) than that.

But there is something in the whole admonition to leave something to the imagination that does actually inform as to the essential nature of pornography: it’s like they teach you in Writing for the Screen 101–unless you can see it on the screen, it doesn’t go into the script.

This relates to the ‘visual’ nature of the ejaculatory orgasm (and why most porn centers around male arousal and sating)–it’s visibly demonstrable. (Here we run into the inverse of my previous argument that art students should study shitty images, pornographers should study art history, as well: because you can actually depict non-male ecstasy.)

(As a tangential note although I can’t find them now: there are a handful of popular tumblr porn gifs that I do think are exceptions to this notion: despite being close-ups–which I’m not especially fond of–they focus on the pulsing muscular contractions associated with orgasm. In one, a hand stimulates the clitoris of an Asian woman. She audibly squeals as her anus and perineum spasms. In others, ejaculatory contractions can be seen at the case of the erection.)

Now–lest anyone forgets–this isn’t a good picture but the decision to present it in such a way that it is both entirely clear what she is doing but the viewer is not afforded an unobstructed view of the typical erogenous zones. Also, the fact that we don’t do the coded porn thing of zooming in on the woman’s oh-face (a la Albert Pocej’s staid Orgasm series) and instead are presented with the tableau sans access to erogenous zones and within context, this scene is decidedly about female masturbation via orgasm.

In other words, there’s no way the viewers can make this about themselves. Unless they think that perhaps she is fantasizing about them–which is, in itself, radical as to do so demands the recognition that she is not an object and has her own individual agency, volition and inner life (to which the viewer has no immediate access.)

Source: bjrninyourhead

Sam Cox – Miss Mac (2017)

A bit of a disclaimer to start off with: Cox’s work is FAR more hardcore than I’d normally showcase.

That being said: although his work is over-the-top as far as raunchiness goes, he is innovative.

As a rule, I am dismissive of TTL metered flash-driven, ultra-contrastiness (regardless of whether it’s color, a la Ren Hang, or B&W).

Cox, however, does use it consistently to facilitate a disarming immediacy. For example, I have mixed feelings about the framing here. On the one hand, I can’t really accuse it of the usual dismemberment although there’s very clearly no sense of extension beyond the borders of the frame. The orientation of the image, very clearly implies that although we don’t fully see the handstand’s foundation, it is clearly supporting Miss Mac’s full weight. Conversely, I do appreciate the sense of hurry up and get the shot because this is an ephemeral moment. (That’s another thing for which Cox does have quite the knack.)

What I love the most about this is the way the flash casts a shadow that–in turn–creates a sense of increasing separation between Miss Mac and the wall against which she’s bracing her feet–it’s exquisite.

Source: decayx

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I have no idea where these images originated and that’s truly unfortunate. They’re hardly flawless–the poses are a bit too marked by self-conscious contrivance; however, they do feature carefully coordinated lighting design, a clear sense of purpose and although perhaps not intentional: there’s a sense of reflexive connection between content and context (i.e. the incisive sense of well-worn procedure in tandem with the carefully considered attention to detail).

It’s possible I’m projecting my own OCD tendencies onto this photo set. I’m very much a creature of habit. I’m very predictable and if someone knows my schedule, you can predict where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing with 100% accuracy give or take a seven or so minute deviation on either side.

I’ve always been like this. It’s part of how I’ve learned to survive in the desert of the real. There’s comfort in knowing the train arrives at this time and takes this long to get me where I’m going. Any delays, deviations, etc. cause me intense stress.

I get agitated when folks with a hippy bent preach new age/Buddhist mindfulness at me. It’s like my default setting is what such folks actively pursue. I’m constantly trying to be less aware of every goddamn little piece of sensory input screaming for a piece of my immediate focus.

What’s ironic to me is that my all this rigorously circumscribed need for order, predictability and certainty is less about iron fisted control. It’s like that Baudelaire quip about remaining boring, ordered and dull in life so that you may be exceedingly violent and unpredictable in your creative work.

The regimentation I cultivate in my own life is really a means to an end. To return to the metaphor of trains–with their timetables and presumed correlation to said timetables–it’s almost always the days where I’m merely going through the motions out of habit, and am following a particular thought that takes an unexpected turn that captivates me. I’ll completely forget that I’m on a train and end up four or five stops beyond where I meant to disembark. (As much as I crave order and hate when things go awry, I never mind these lapses. What they offer in insight is more than equal to the resulting frustrations of missing my stop and running late to appointments.)

What does this introspective speculation have to do with anything? Well, I think my need for predictable rituals as a defense against the mundaneness of daily exigencies is an itch that I don’t usually feel gets scratched by explicit depictions of sexual expression. Except these images appeal (a great deal, actually) to the order seeking side of my brain.

And I can’t help but think how aspects of my own sexual expression are similarly circumscribed. As an adolescent, masturbation was highly ritualized for me. (I’m not sure if it’s the OCD tendencies or being raised super religious… I think I could also point to my druggy years with all that focus on set and setting.)

It reminds me of something my friend Amandine said to me about attraction. Trying to seduce someone by making them want you is the wrong course of action. Instead it’s better to make them feel comfortable sharing time and space with you.

That’s the other thing about this that appeals to me. So much pornography hinges on a sort of heteronormative checklist of activities being ticked in a proscribed order. It’s about showcasing particular information–without any sort of consideration as to why this information as opposed to that information. In other words, matters of inclusion vs. exclusion are dictated by notions of what will appeal to the broadest set of viewers possible.

I’m much more interested in things that interrogate why something is being showcased over any number of other things. And these images have a strong feeling of what I’m being showed are not just things that turn the author on, there’s a great deal of effort put into presenting those things as a series of decisive moments in an erotic progression.

So yes, the attention to detail in the set design and lighting orchestration speak to creating a sense of context. The presentation of decisive moments fosters a sense of documentary objectivity. (This isn’t exactly well-managed from the point of the subjects–whose poses seem self-consciously contrived.) But it does seem to be about creating a comfortable space as a starting point and emphasizing concrete ritual procedure in a carefully considered fashion. And that feels honest and affirming of my own experience in a way that porn never really offers me.

Source: bedxxx2

Alessandro Ruiz – Untitled (201X)

I think spending approximately 25 hours a week keeping this blog running has perhaps warped my brain to a greater or lesser extent–you know kind of like that joke Bill Murray tells in What About Bob?

Bob Wiley:
[telling a joke]
The doctor draws two circles and says “What do you see?” the guy says “Sex.”

[everybody laughs]

Bob Wiley:
Wait a minute, I haven’t even told the joke yet! So the doctor draws
trees, “What do you see?” the guy says “sex”. The doctor draws a car,
owl, “Sex, sex, sex”. The doctor says to him “You are obsessed with
sex”, he replies “Well you’re the one drawing all the dirty pictures!”

Like I can’t tell you how many times I’ll be looking at something and be like wait, is that what I think it is? (It almost never is what I’m thinking, unless I’m on Tumblr and then it’s usually worse than I thought it was.)

Like with the mussed hair and pose and position of the hand above, there’s something both suggestive of masturbation and self-conscious demurring. (I can’t ascertain if Ruiz continues to have a web presence outside Model Mayhem but his work suggests that either of these readings–at a minimum–fit his works’ comportment towards eroticism.

If I were feeling pedantic I might draw a comparison between Ruiz and Erotobot–the latter is technically the superior image maker in sum but it’s a question of carefully considered composition vs. visceral immediacy. (I prefer both in tandem but since you rarely find that, I tend to favor the latter over the former.)

But while I don’t agree with the composition of this image–I do like her against the dense black background, I’d just have framed it wider than this. It did actually make me question something; namely: the notion of demureness as it pertains to social expectations placed upon women.

I’m thinking here about the religious notion I was raised with wherein the body/flesh is the locus of sin and therefore the genesis point of shame. I mean as far back as The Creation myth we see that Eve is tempted by the snake, she in turn tempts Adam and then they realize they are naked and try to cover themselves.

And it occurs to me that in the art historical, phalleocentric history of art there is a tendency to conflate a post-orgasmic languor in much the same fashion as what is the expected behavior of the properly demure.

I’m also curious as to the restraint in this image with regards to graphically explicit presentation vis-a-vis the rest of the work.

Not sure if pressed I could prove this thesis but it’s what I’m thinking about at the moment, fwiw.

Source: afroui

Gregoire Alexandre – [←] Fer 1 (2012); [→] Fer 2 (2012)

You attend to the shape, sometimes by tracing it, sometimes by screwing up your eyes so as not to see the colour clearly, and in many other ways. I want to say: This is the sort of thing that happens while one ‘directs one’s attention to this or that’. But it isn’t these things by themselves that make us say someone is attending to the shape, the colour, and so on. Just as a move in chess doesn’t consist simply in moving a piece in such-and-such a way on the board-nor yet in one’s thoughts and feelings as one makes the move: but in the circumstances that we call “playing a game of chess”, “solving a ches problem”, and so on.

                –Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations §33

We don’t know what’s
going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of
matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of
typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same
typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint
tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf
miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look
at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on
here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling
band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
                  

                —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: gregoirealexandre.com

Claudia Jares – [↑] El Jardin Prohibido #8 (2015); [←] 7 (2011); [→] Untitled (2006)

Remember how I’m always going on and on about how there must be something being added to the water in Poland because of all the top-notch work being made there at present?

South America seems to have something similar going on.

Jares, like Paula Aparicio, hails from Buenos Aires–a city I’m hoping to finally visit next year.

The first two things I notice about her work pertains to influences. It is impossible to look at the uppermost image here and not think of Nobuyoshi Araki. And you can’t browse through more than a handful of her color images without flashing back to the hyper-stylized, violent cacophony of color and garish production design as an aesthetic intended to question whether ugliness and beauty isn’t more of a cycle than a spectrum that is Floria Sigismondi’s oeurve.

But I’m not interested in doing more than pointing to those names, because–in truth–although Jares definitely shares with both the aforementioned artists what I’ve previous referred to an omnivorous eye, the point of her work is less about proving a point (which in the case of Araki might be seen as proving that the deviant and depraved desires of the flesh can be beautiful to behold; or with Sigismondi, that with the right attention and focus, the ugly may be rendered if not exactly beautiful then aesthetically compelling).

To put too fine a point on it perhaps, Araki and Sigismondi make work designed to get the viewer off–figuratively in Sigismondi’s case, more often than not literally in Araki’s.

And it feels to me like Jares is far more interested in those indelible signifiers–the way already taut muscles begin to spasm in winter light, a stray hair looped and plastered with sweat and spit against the spit below a trembling lower lip; that moment of unplanned, accidental eye contact that sends you plunging over the edge sooner than you expected. Those serendipitous moments when someone comes, and then the force of it causes a chain reaction where in response the other partner comes and them coming only makes the first partner’s orgasm intensify.

There are little miraculous moments in each image that Jares’ makes–the rain coating the woman’s skin in the first image (not to mention the stunning contrast between skin tone and tile); the way in the second image the shadowed side of her face both dips to where their is shadow without texture but you can still see her eye (and eyelight) in the murk; and in maybe one of the best examples I’ve encountered in at least six months of a vertical oriented composition that should 120% be a skinny frame but also consider how the parabola of light on the back of his neck and shoulders adds such dynamic dimensional to the frame. (Also, back dimples…I’m a sucker for them.)

Or, more apporpriately, here’s Jares on the relationship between the erotic and her creative practice:

     My making erotic photography comes as no surprise to me: I’ve been drawn to the erotic since I was a teenager, drawn by the secrets and the mystery behind those images and its characters.
     Back from school at my grandmother’s house I would step in the bathroom where, hidden between the towels, lay an old porno, filled with sensual and sensitive images, and romance. It must have belonged to my grandfather, and thus to later generations…
     … I used to feed upon those pictures, wondering on the meaning and form of orgasm, masturbation… After twenty minutes my grandma would call out for me; the food was served.
     I’ve always been into sensual images, objects, clothing, shoes, stockings, which triggered ideas. I cut and glued to my bedroom walls pictures of Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Claudia Sánchez, Marlon Brando, Robert Plant, Jim Morrison.
     My music… was my kingdom, my shelter, the place where every feeling, every sensation ran through my body. It made my way into photography, and, considering my kinky teenage inclinations, it was only natural to combine the carnal with the power of creation.
     I’ve always enjoyed telling stories through my pictures. Enclosed, in the dark, at night… I’m thrilled by the unknown, the unlit, the irrational, the supernatural.
     The women that have worked with me know and understand that this sensitivity is with me in every job, be it a portrait, fashion, or an erotic shoot.
     There’s always a sense of eroticism in all my pieces. I’ve been lucky enough to work with people that have allowed me to take a glimpse of their souls.
      I often work with women, since there is a sort of symbiosis, of ease, encouraging, pleasantly gratifying for both of us. As a photographer I take pictures as I would take them to myself, which I frequently do. My strength lies in the artist, in what I am made of, a woman, a body of emotions.

Source: claudiajares.com

Victor Stamp – Colonial Exhibition from The Garden of Oblivion series (201X)

Of The Garden of Oblivion, Stamp embraces the contrived label post-photography.

Being the type who is inherently suspicious of folks who prefix trends, tendencies and or movements with the word post-, I’m not sure what that means–if it means anything at all.

Let’s examine the image itself and try to reverse engineer a working understanding of what post-photography might entail.

It’s reasonably clear that the images are of a particular vintage–early 20th century; and that the titles have been added as ex post facto interventions.

On one level the title verifies this initial impression. As we’re informed here: the images are from an early 20th century provenance and were distributed as a tabloid in French colonial Africa.

Also, apparently the images have been carefully re-sequenced to imply a more equitable relationship between the parties in the photos.

However, the text that has been added as an additional intervention points back to the colonial history of exploitative export practices–listing material resources harvested en masse from Africa and then shipped back for European consumption.

The conceptual purpose of this would seem to be an reclaim the erotic potential of the images while still concretely linking the work to its ugly colonial history.

Don’t get me wrong, I think several of these would be compelling, artistic pieces if you could divorce them of their initial context. The trouble is: I don’t think it works like that.

To illustrate this point let’s consider a divisive symbol in the U.S.: The Battle Flag of The Confederacy. As I was raised primarily in the south, I’ve encountered a great many people who proclaim that the flag is about heritage not hate.

It’s an entirely specious, willfully ignorant assertion. William Porcher Miles was ostensibly the designer and he ardently supported the 3/5 compromise–a premise that couldn’t be more racist af.

When presented with this fact, most heritage-not-haters will counter that it represents that notion of the sovereignty of states’ rights–again completely glossing the fact that the US Civil War was fought over a states right to own slaves.

My default response to confederate flag strokers has become simplified over the years. I point out that to the Navajo, the swastika had a history much longer than its association with National Socialism. Only they called it a whirling log.

Yet, after WWII–and due to the now indelible association with the Nazis–the Navajo voted to retire the symbol due to the horrors with which it’s use was now tainted.