Tag: undies

Natalia Nobile – [↑] Untitled (2017); [↖] Untitled (2017); [↗] Untitled (2018); [↗] Untitled (2016); [+] Untitled (2017); [→] Untitled (2017); [↙] Untitled (2017); [↘] Untitled (2016); [↓] Untitled (2017)

I don’t necessarily like all Nobile’s work. I’ve been wanting to share some of her work for a while, I just haven’t had the time to really sift through her work until this afternoon.

I sat off drafting this post with the notion of talking about parallels between her work and other similar image makers. However, I realized at a certain point that at face value her images are compelling because of their immediacy.

What we are being shown is clear enough–it’s the why we are being shown it that remains ambiguous. But why we’re being shown what we’re seeing is less of a preoccupation than questions like are those Frida Kahlo panties? Cyrano or Elephant? Is the woman straddling the bedpost posing; additionally, is this pose supposed to suggest something vaguely masturbatory? Are those cannabis plants?

In the picture of the woman in the pink body suit on the bicycle looking back over her shoulder while feigning the fastening of her helmet struck me as having exquisite color rendition. Same with the are those pot plants one.

But organizing them together in this way showed the extent to which Nobile is using color with subtlety and style. It also shows that although you don’t necessarily realize it that color not only ties her images together within themselves, it actually ties her work together just as well as a signature.

Karen Kuehn – Untitled from MetropoLOVE (2010)

Confession: I find this ineffably effing sexy.

It’s really all the little things in concert that get me worked up into a lather. The texture–his pants (the bunching of the rolled down waist band against the velveteen texture of the rest of the garment), the thickness of the cotton of the waistband and leg holes of her panties (and the visible stitching!!!) vs. the busy pattern on the thinner, inner cotton. His skin against her skin (the sheen and grain of it so tactile.

I love that the picture in and of itself communicates–without a single word–some of the truth underlying the image. The illumination as well as the background (what you can see of it) is very clearly arid and dry. And it turns out that Kuehn is a burner and travels to Burning Man every year with her camera gear.

But it’s really the intimacy of it. His thumb is clearly inside her underwear but the position makes it clear that it’s in the crack of her ass. Further, his index and ring finger are positioned in such a way that he’s almost certainly touching her anus through the material.

Given a wider frame, you would’ve lost the emphasis on the graphicness of the touch while–presuming nothing in the background–contributing a sense of two lovers alone in an empty world.

But the close up here in combination with the gesture, brings in questions of public vs private. With this frame there’s no way to know if anyone else can see this but given that the photographer can, we presume others can but since we don’t see others in the frame, they are both engaging in amorous foreplay with a potential for the behavior to be occurring simultaneously private and in public. (It’s a clever way of invoking the thrill seeking mind set that drives most people to attempt to have sex in public in the first place: the balancing of the risk of being caught with not actually being caught.