Tag: piss

Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Flora & Fauna (2016)

Any one making an artsy image of someone pissing is firmly standing in Emmet Gowin’s formidable shadow. (Especially when it’s a B&W image like above.)

I’m referring specifically to one of my favorite ever photographs that Gowin made of his wife Edith peeing in the open doorway of a ramshackle shed.

There was an article in The New Yorker several weeks back about this photograph that’s more than worth the two minutes it takes to read.

I’m not willing to place the above image on even close to the same level as Gowin’s photo of Edith. But the article winds down with a sort of lamentation on the fate of depictions of intimacy in our current mass culture of oversharing:

I wonder, sometimes, about the fate of this kind of photographic
intimacy in the age of Instagram, when users are encouraged to share the
granular details of their lived experience, their most nominally
intimate moments, but on a platform governed by likes and clicks.

To me, the above image may function in the fashion described but despite some pretty gnarly technical flaws (#skinnyframebullshit being a huge one), there is something carefree and playful about it that turns what might otherwise be a salacious image, into something much more matter-of-fact.

It’s also worth mentioning that the model in this image is doing some crazy great work. I’ve never seen anything quite like this amazing image of her by stef-des.

Source: florafaunauniverse

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

How much more effective would the above image have been if it adopted a perspective that included both women more or less in scale on par with this image?

It would not only have avoided reducing these two women to little more than their genitals and the area immediately surrounding them; it would’ve made for a better image.

Also, for the last fucking time: the distinction between B&W and color shouldn’t be a desire for it to seem more or less ‘arty’. respectively.

Source: sanstemptation

The earliest instance seems to be this post; beyond that your guess is as good as mine.

This image demonstrates at least a cursory concern for composition. The focal point of the image is not the center of the frame. There is a consistence in the angle and space allotted to the outside-edge-of-the-tub/floor and the inside-of-the-tub/tile wall. The model is watching what is happening in the frame not searching for approval from the viewer. She is presented nearly whole in the frame. Lastly, the flash is exposes the white fiberglass perfectly, stopping short of overexposure.

I love that this young woman is still wearing stockings and cute top. Along with the polish on her nails, the image retains color that levels out what would have otherwise been the tub being too white or her skin blanched.

There is clearly an urolagnia element to this scene. Yet it is– for me at least–mediated by the geyser-like appearance which although certainly urine echoes tropes surrounding female ejaculation.

In other words, some forethought and technical skill went into making this image. It’s gritty and transgressive but quality is not sacrificed just because its content features fetishistic elements.

Emmet Gowin Edith Danville, Virginia 1971

When I study Gowin’s work I am always struck by its deep reverence. Whether his subject is his wife Edith, or various members of her family or his later aerial landscape, each image is treated with the same quiet wonder.

In Edith Danville, Virginia 1971, Gowin’s wife stands in the doorway of a dilapidated shed and pisses on the floor—the scene is handled with a quiet awe rather at odds with ‘taboo’ of enjoying the sight of someone urinating.

Whether intended or not, it strikes me that this is reverent watching is not at all unlike the way pissing is commonly depicting in pornographic media.

The actress informs her partner she ‘has to pee’ and moves several steps away to stand with her legs spread wide or more often than not to squat. With this movement her body transforms from the discrete catalogue of penetrable orifices and denuded erogenous zones it is likely to have been presented as for most of the scene to something whole and complete. She gazes down at her cunt, or looks away from the camera like Edith—breaking her near constant, self-conscious awareness of the spectator. She begins to piss but by the time she remembers she is expected to be self-conscious, the camera has begun to zoom in on the fluid ensuing from between her legs.

‘Having to pee’ is, unequivocally, a need. Given the raison d’etre for porn—manufacturing male pleasure—admitting that women have needs is unusual. Admittedly, sexualizing yet another aspect of female bodied experience is problematic, but for me that is trumped by how hot it is when porn—however tenuously— implies the truth: nothing provides more pleasurable than meeting the needs another.