Tag: nude

Petter Hegre – Aqua feat. Cleo (2015)

When it comes to Hegre and his ‘art’, I have mixed feelings.

One the one hand: no matter if it’s his artier forays (a la above) or his more pornographic stuff, he absolutely has a knack for carefully considered, subtly nuanced rendering of light–especially in terms of skintone.

The other hand? He has access to a stable of imaging gear far exceeding the inventory of most high end rental establishments. (For example: the images above were made using a PhaseOne IQ3 80MB medium format digital back–an item that likely set Hegre back $60K when he purchased it.)

I’m not going to hate on someone for having the wherewithal to invest in a camera that costs as much as a sports car. But more often than not I don’t see what that investment contributes to his work. For example: it’s not exactly ideal but there but there is more than a passing resemblance between these images of Cleo and Jock Sturges color work. (Yes, Sturges is working in 8×10 large format–thus there is again the issue of the preciousness of the equipment. Also, I think Sturges’ is probably a gold star pedophile and I think his efforts to sidestep this diminish his work. In the case of his B&W photos, they are–IMO–over-praised. However, his color work is not as easily shrugged off.)

Anyway, I was looking at the set from which I culled these images. (If you click the Aqua in the title, you can see the set 16 images of which these 4 are a part.)

Looking at all 16 images, it occurred to me that likely what bothers me about Hegre so much is his emphatic insistence that his work is art.

Now, if he means that his work exhibits technically accomplishment–that’s one thing. It’s rather another for him to hire a model, get her to disrobe and then take a bunch of pictures of her and then edit hundreds of photos down to a dozen or so of the best of the best.

Yet given the 16 images in this series, there’s not a great deal of consistency. The one vertical composition arguable has better tonality than the rest but it sticks out like a sore thumb. Also, the order in which the vertical composition is inserted actually distracts from the visual flow between images in the series. Further, the look at the camera ignore the camera on the part of the model is hell of indecisive. (Although, it occurred to me that although it is unlikely this was the intention: there is something about seeing vs not seeing that is highly erotic–i.e. when I am watching a lover body intersect with my own I may alternate between watch out bodies coming together to heighten the physicality of my arousal, however as arousal stretch ever closer to crescendo there grows a tension from which focus on visual stimulus may actually prove to be a distraction.)

It wasn’t easy to distill this series into a smaller grouping. I do think there are several of the images that could easily be dropped. There are several where the angle of her face is unflattering–but I suspect the image was kept because of the posture of her body. And I specifically dropped the one image that shows most clearly that Cleo is positioned in shallow water near a ledge where the water suddenly becomes deeper.

With this edit, it’s not so hard for me to concede that maybe Hegre isn’t as pretentious as a think of him as being. I mean if you sort of squint and take the sense of the portrait in the top left image, the sense of quiet reverie in the top right image, the sense of place in the lower left image and the sense of ethereal physicality in the lower right image–there is a fully formed and conceptually sophisticated single scene that suggests itself in the intersections between the images.

However, that I chose these images from a wider set and then ordered them in the fashion I did (which suggests something not unlike a narrative progression) is what it took for me to be able to see that.

Perhaps Hegre had something roughly analogous in mind. Or not. In all likelihood what he does requires a certain degree of open ended-ness in order to account for the various interests and appetites of the consumer. Really, I think that’s the crux of my frustration with Hegre: he could clearly produce more resonant and uncompromising work but he seems more interested in commercial viability. (Something which strikes me as a shame and a waste of talent.)

Arthur Tress – [↖] Young Man in Burning Forest (1995); [↑] Bride and Groom, New York (1971) [↗] Boy with Cigarette, Albany, NY (1970); [←] Spinal Tap, New York, NY (1996); [] Twinka At Arles, France (1985); [→] Teenager Drinking on Telephone Pole, Bronx, NY (1969); [↙] Sex with Vice (1977); [↓] Untitled (197X); [↘] Male Nude (1970)

In ritual, the world as lived and the world as imagined…
turns out to be the same world.
–C. Geertz

MetArt – Title unknown {remixed} (200X)

Here’s the original iteration of the above image:

The earliest search engine cached version of the image I found is from late 2007–specifically: a Flickr user named K. Pharran. (Looking through the 32 images in that account suggests the owner was posting other people’s work and presenting it as his own. The variance in style between the images is far too disparate to be from a single source.)

Several hits in the Google search came back with mentions of MetArt and the fact that there is such a hi-res version of the image still floating around out there in correlation with the earliest posting does a good bit of suggestion that they’re likely the source.

What I wanted to point out is that the fact that there is a hi res version of the image available means that there’s a lot more room available as far as color correction. (The original would’ve likely been considered artfully moody in the mid-aughts but in the late 10s, our expectations regarding what pictures made underwater look like, the remix is demonstrable clearer, more legible and captivating image.)

Source: tumblr.com

Ofer Dabush – Untitled (2017)

This is the fourth time I’ve featured Dabush’s work in ten months.

His work emphasizes an astute attention to the interplay between colors, an impeccable sense of composition as a mode of graphic design as well as a stripped bare minimalism as act of visceral confrontation–a confection as intriguing as it is intoxicating.

The struggle that I’m beginning to have with his work, however; is that I see him leaning heavily on experiments other photographers and image makers have already done a lot of heavy lifting on.

We all borrow and remix–there’d be no art or creative expression without those acts. Yet, who Dabush borrows so assiduously from is a bit more problematic.

One of my previous posts was meant to point out that several recent pieces of his might as well be direct visual quotes from Prue Stent. He’s also posted work highly reminiscent of Laurence Philomene’s. The above is of a kind with the predominant thrust of Joanne Leah’s work from the last several years.

I keep thinking of Watson and Crick vs. Rosalind Franklin. If you’re a science nerd, you’ll probably know this story already but Watson and Crick had been researching DNA but were more or less stuck. Someone introduced them to the work of Rosalind Franklin–who had discovered that DNA was arranged in a double helix formation. Watson and Crick realized that the discovery was huge and rushed to publish it, so they could stake their claim to it. It’s only recently that the two thieving bastards are started being treated as such and Franklin is only just beginning to receive her due.

Not saying that Dabush is necessarily stealing. (Correction: he 100% is in the case of Prue Stent, the rest are more nuanced and I believe given the rationale that it’s not stealing if you take something and make it better–I do think he is pushing the things he’s borrowing from other artists in meritorious directions. But it is still somewhat off putting to see a cisgender dude seemingly target the work of up and coming women artists.

Alan Sonfist – Myself Becoming One with the Tree (1969)

Me (to myself): this sequence is naturally predisposed to a .gif format.

Myself (to me): you know how to make a a .gif, you lazy ass hussy.

I can’t say the idea of making photo sequences into .gifs was is original. I stole it from this post featuring a .gif of Duane Michals’ 1969 The Human Condition.

But I do sort of take issue with that post because although culture dictates that the .gif is how we are most accustomed to processing photo sequences, the sequences were not originally contextualized as animation. Thus while this is definitely a good idea to get people into work they might not otherwise encounter, you really absolutely must be honest about the intervention upon the work, IMO.

Source: istmos