Tag: threesome

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

I have so many complicated and conflicting feelings about posting shit like this. Or honestly even looking at them–it feels a bit like being stranded in the middle of a desert desperate with hunger and thirst and having an airplane fly overhead and drop menus from a fancy restaurant. I’m looking at something that will never be a part of my life.

I don’t know maybe that’s what gives this project a vitality that some of you seem to respond to: the wanting makes it seem more relevant.

In the end I’m posting this gif loop not because of what it depicts but because of the notion that maybe someday someone will see me as containing multitudes and within those multitudes are contained all three of these lovers.

Source unknown – Title unknown (200X)

It was the perfect picture of utter spirituality
and utter degradation. I was fascinated and could not turn away my eyes.
By watching them I in effect permitted their mating to take place and
so committed myself to accepting the consequences—all because I wanted
to see what would happen. I wanted in on a secret.

–Annie Dillard, The Force That Drives the Flower

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

I have so many complicated feels about this…

On the one hand the way she’s curled in the frame with the dude pressing into her from the left while pinning her wrist against the couch as the other guy leans in so that she take his cock in her mouth is super problematic–tied up in patriarchal notions of female receptivity and convenience with regard to male sexual gratification.

And yet, that’s countered–to a small degree–by the way that she is stretching to meet the dick she’s sucking and the way her foot is pressed into the other guys face is probably some foot fetishist shit but it does suggest a degree of control and willful participation.

(I also completely fail to understand non-queer instantiations of group sex–but then I tend not to really understand normal human boundaries beyond the most basic notion that your right to swing your fists ends where my face begins. Also, I find it hilarious that with that heteronormative wisdom that a woman is supposed to save herself for a man while men can fuck whomever, whenever–that strictly hetero threesomes increase the woman’s number by two and the male participants by only one. Lastly, if you’re in a threesome, why not maximize your pleasure. I mean I’ve never been in a full blown threesome but the times I have that have gotten close, I’ve instinctive engaged physically with both participants. I just don’t understand how it’s any fun any other way. And if you’re a dude who likes gay-for-pay lesbian action and still fully believe that the actresses are straight but you’re not okay sucking a little bit of dick to liven things up then you are super gross.)

Really, what appeals to me is the sort of twisted empathy I feel towards her. I’ve mentioned before how we speak of desire most often in terms of hunger. I don’t experience it that way. My experience of desire is closer to thirst.

I don’t think you can read this in a way that illuminates anything about thirst but as far as hunger, I feel like these dudes are hungry for her body and their very real and physically demonstrable hunger functions simultaneously as a sort of you are hungry and I care about you so I want to feed you, I am not hungry but I am thirsty and the way you need me takes a bit of the edge of the thirst I feel.

I have to have that feeling of being needed and if I were ever in a situation to have people need me in a fashion of a kind with the above image, I would not squander it.

Source: xxx-filesss

Author unknown – Michele ist gut für zwei (1980)

I stumbled onto @musorka‘s retro pornography motherlode for the first time roughly a month ago.

As best as I can tell he mines scans from another site and posts them to Tumblr. The volume is astounding, the quality frequently dubious. But there are some real gems if you’re willing to put in some time.

For example: if you can ignore the obnoxiously coded depiction of cunnilingus, the above is actually compellingly staged. The action is cheated towards the camera but in a fashion that sans the aforementioned awkward protruding tongue, would be something that would be easy to overlook. (In fact, I would freaking LOVE to recreate this as a fine art image.)

However, there’s actually an even more overriding reason I’m posting this on the first day of the New Year. I’m the sort of sap who makes scads of resolutions each and every year. For the last 5 years, I’ve made goals with the form of shoot X number rolls of film each month; add Y number of new photos to my portfolio by EOY.

2016 was a garbage year but excluding my goal of reading 45 books (on which I failed miserably), I did better than I ever have in any previous year–successfully completing a little more than half my resolutions.

Yet, I think my focus on completing my resolutions actually ended up causing me to post work that I don’t–in hindsight–believe to be as good as it should’ve been.

This year, I’m trying to leaven my urge to hold myself accountable for doing instead of sitting around and thinking about doing or worse trying to do. I keep thinking about Helen Levitt’s statement that photographers can talk about what they want to do or equivocating about the conceptual or whatever but unless you’re running film through the camera, you are not doing fuck all.

There’s also this story of a reporter interviewing Levitt in her apartment:

When I was in her apartment, I saw boxes of prints
stacked up. One was labeled simply nothing good. Another one was
marked here and there.

“That’s the beginning of another book,” she said about the box.

“Can I take a peek?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said. “‘Cause I’m unsure about it. If I was sure that they were worth anything, I’d show it to you. But I can’t.”

Well, she must have decided they were worth something. That book, Here and There, came out a few years later.

One of my biggest gripes about digital imaging–despite everything about the way it looks–is that it allows you to proceed uncritically. You aren’t limited by how many exposures you have. You’re limited by battery life and the size of your memory card, nothing more. What tends to follow–almost as a matter of course–is this spray and pray approach or worse a we’ll just fix it in post mentality.

Looking through musorka’s Tumblr, it strikes me that there is an argument for volume. Not in the making of good images, necessarily but in learning to use the work that went into failed images to channel into making images that succeed.

There are so many awkward expression in European porn from the late 70s and early 80s. And I’m not for a second suggesting any of these images reach the heights of lower case a art, but given that it’s porn and so much of it is godawful, the good stands out even more obviously. Let me show you.

This works for many of the same reasons this does but mostly due to simplicity.

There’s something meditated and in the moment about this one.

I have a paraphilia for braids but I also like the lower image here because of the way it’s explicit without being at all graphic. ❤

The expression in the top panel and the lighting in the lower panel on this one are both unfeigned and luminous.

This is entirely awkward except for the way his expression in the context of the way she’s guiding him creates what could perhaps be termed a ‘feminist’ porn image.

The expression of the woman with the bangs at the right is effing priceless.

No qualifications needed–these three images are all excellent.

And lastly–another example of cheating towards the camera without being obvious about it.

Source unknown – Title unknown (19XX)

Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but
all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued
bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man
has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love.
Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly
helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp
his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him
by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life
and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king.
Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it
gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the
statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil,
once love has taken root.

–Emma Goldman, Marriage and Love

Source: oldtimepleasure

Source unknown – Title unknown (200X)

With images, my personal preference is to always have some sort of insinuation of a comprehensive context; thus, here: all you can see is three people and a bed–contributing a sense of this-could-be-happening-anywhere-in-the-western-world. (Whereas, I’d prefer to actually see the window in the background that is merely implied here; also, maybe enough of the way furniture is oriented in the room so that I have an inkling of whose space it is, i.e. is it her space or is it one of the boys’ domicile? The sheets make me feels like it’s hers…)

That one small-ish quibble notwithstanding, I do like this because it feels like it thwarts a lot of assumptions that would typically be projected here.

For example: I’ve been asked by several followers if it’s possible to depict a subject with their legs spread wide and have the resulting image not come across as objectifying. My answer is usually something along the lines of viewing the vulva as an eyelid–if it blinked open would the newly unshrouded iris be staring directly at the camera? Then yes, there’s a huge potential that the image will be read as objectifying.

In this case, however, I feel like this is perhaps an exception that proves the rule. And the why of that I think has to do with the fact that the focus is on attending to her pleasure. I mean–yes, the one gent has his finger inserted into her anus up to the second segment; and yes, it’s probably a warm up for anal sex.

The tableau is arranged to play towards the camera but the participants are ignoring the camera. The way the guy with the finger in her ass is always bracing her butt with his hand doesn’t seem solely about ensuring a good view. It feels like an effort to organically provide additional support as she’s trying to hold her own leg back and out of the way.

The whole thing feels (to me) intimate and attentive. I think this is another image I might want to borrow inspiration from to pursue in my own work at a later date.

Source: mysecretperv

Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)

There are definitely essayists who are more formal, more critical, more highfalutin–but very few people approach writing with Rebecca Solnit’s firm belief in the potential of the marriage of words to ideas as a means of sparking curiosity, that most tantalizing precursor to wonderment.

In other words, she doesn’t treat her reader as if they are an empty vessel she is intended to fill with her great and varied knowledge. She suggests revelatory parallels, indulges lapses, digressions and exists fascinatingly somewhere between narrative and a sort of liberal arts whirligig. She’s dazzling to read; often bordering on transcendent. (She’s the sort of writer I dream of being.)

I can’t help but look at this image in the context of her most recent collection of essays The Encyclopedia of Troubles and Spaciousness–specifically Journey to the Center.

It’s the second piece she’s written about Icelandic artist Elín Hansdóttir‘s PATH installation–which is a pitch dark labyrinth setup in a gallery that one person enters to explore at a time.

On the matter of light and dark, Solnit observes that generally we are afraid of darkness and that one of the many things Elín Hansdóttir is interrogating is the notion of darkness as generative instead of detrimental–much as those spaces where piles of snow are last to melt, is also where the grass comes in greener and faster than anywhere else.

Of light, she notes:

Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your unknowns
rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors, and perhaps part of what
makes pornography so pornographic is the glaring light in which it
transpires, that and the lack of touch, the substitution of eyes for
skin, of seeing for touching.

This is not a good image. It’s somewhere between what I’d term a medium shot and a close-up. And while you can ascertain what’s going on–a fairly blase, heteronormative FFM scene–it manages to neither focus on the impending penetration nor provides any sort of coherent check-in with what’s going on in the broader scene. (In other words, the camera needs to be either two feet closer or two feet further back for this scene to make sense as a still image; whether or not it was intended as a still image is immaterial–whether they are moving or still the general stipulations with regard to the grammar of an image  are analogous, respectively, to writing a speech versus public oratory.)

So if It’s not a good image why are you posting it. Well, simply because if you only consider selective parts of the frame, the light really is sort of gorgeous. The way the oblique light kisses the engorged corona of his cock is effing breath-taking. The delightful illumination rendering the lower woman’s rump with a supple dimensionality; the gorgeous skin tone it brings out along her back.

In other words, the frame improves as the contrivance of the glaring light source diminishes across a distance and is blocked by objects which diffuse it, introduce shadows and texture.

Source unknown – Title unknown (2014)

I am super supportive of work that’s trying to recast bullshit heteronormative assumptions pertaining to MMF.

The frustrating thing is the vast majority of it is artless garbage. (I mean seriously, do a Google search and see how fast you X out of the image results tab.)

I like this for two reason–first there’s at least a baseline of thought with regard to composition. Her body shifts the gaze from left to right. The angle of the cock she’s kissing the head of pushes back against that drift and subsequently you follow the angle of guy in the rear’s erection which he’s pressing into the boys puckered lips.

The lighting is warm and inviting and there’s just enough black in the frame to invoke the tone and tenebrism of someone like Rembrandt.

Second: this is one of those things that I look at and think, oh hey, decent concept but I think it would be better if…

In this case: I don’t care for the way this lens compresses space. (It’s probably a result of optical zoom on a zoom lens paired with APS-C sensor pushing towards the telephoto edge of the spectrum.) Also, the angle of view is super porny as far as let’s make sure everyone gets a good view of the action.

I can see pulling the camera back a couple of feet but then you’d have to deal with some of the additional negative space. In which case, she would have to have a finger in his anus or something to justify the wider perspective.

I’d actually love to restage this and execute the following adjustments: Turn the action so that the boy laying on his back is about 15 degrees off parallel to the focal plane (instead of perpendicular to it as above). Reposition the other guy so that he is kneeling behind the boy with respect to the camera, so that it’s possible to still present his action so that it is legible for the camera.

The woman would stay in more or less the same position she is now, but with the scene rotated 90 degrees so that you can see both the way she’s kissing him as well as her genitals since her butt would be facing towards the camera. Maybe angle her slightly so that it’s visible but not blatant.

The frame would be closer to a panorama and I’d play up the sort of Baroque lighting to sort of recall the gratuitously over-the-top everyone-rolls on molly and relives their birth scene from Sense8–which is actually a decisive nod to Eugenio Recuenco’s work.

Source: a-luscious-life