Tag: Tanya Dakin

Tanya Dakin – Honey feat. Kelsey Dylan (2014)

A week ago yesterday, Tanya Dakin celebrated her 44th birthday.

I first noticed Ms. Dakin’s through her frequent collaborations with the staggeringly talented henrygaudier. I learned she is:

  • a Philadelphia based model/photographer/provacateur;
  • writing a book about her vagina;
  • she [used to] share explicit photos depicting her DD/lg relationship;
  • and she has the most beautiful ink I’ve seen anywhere ever.

Needless to say she had my respect and my attention and she really doesn’t disappoint. Her modeling work constantly pushes the envelope at the same time as any number of psycho-sexual buttons. Thus, I’ve always suspected her of level 9000 badassery skills.

In the last week she’s proven–with the above image as well as her on-point and thoroughly refreshing dismantling of meddlesome anon commentary–that my suspicions were far too modest.

I don’t necessarily understand the framing decisions. (In a strange inversion of the norm, I think the vertical frames work better than the horizontal ones…but there is at least an intrinsic functionality to the framing–whether or not I think it necessarily makes sense: in every frame the force of nature that is Kelsey Dylan is the unquestioned focal point of the image. (And as far as creative decisions go, that is one that will rarely–if ever–lead an artist astray.)

Source: sheshootstoo

Henry Gaudier-Greene – Tanya Dakin: Absinthe and Caviar for Breakfast. (2013)

One (1) of six (6) 4×5 Fujiroids created by Gaudier-Greene and Dakin appearing in Issue 7 of the always comely analogue only art-zine 62nd Floor..

Tanya Dakin is a Philadelphia based model/photographer/provacateur writing a book about her vagina; she shares explicit photos depicting her DD/lg relationship and has the most beautiful ink I’ve ever seen. 

Gaudier-Green is a photographer who shares my commitment to film and shoots with Pentax 67ii.

I dig their respective work with limited reservations–Dakin is a competent image maker but I am far more taken with her no safety net approach to life and the uncompromising openness with which she shares herself; Gaudier-Greene’s has preternatural aptitude for color work and any sort of instant film he touches becomes a medium for the transmission of god-like beauty; thus the lack of specificity in his B&W film work is never something I quite know how to reconcile.

They remind me of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí: individually I respect the quality and care with which they craft their work; however, it always feels as if their personal work suffers from the echoing absence of the things that render their collaborative endeavors so effortlessly transcendent.

That’s not to say this image is free of problems and distractions–it isn’t. But between the attention to color and light, the wawker-jawed composition gets its volume turned down by the ‘realness’ of a fully-experienced unmediated moment in which two impressive talents merge into a single, uninterrupted and timeless genius.