Tag: unshaven armpits

Igor Mukhin

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If it moves, Igor Mukhin likely shoots it; if it doesn’t, he’ll still take aim.

With nearly 5000 images—split between B&W film scans and Leica AG M9 captures, amassed over 6.5 years—perusing his photostream is like mainlining a hyper-distilled, chaotic mélange of interesting, occasionally ingenious work.

My head doesn’t wrap around such profligate excess easily—limitation is too central a feature in my own process. (Read: I am poor.) But I can let that slide. What I fail to fathom is how Mukhin’s haphazard, throw-it-at-the-wall-to-see-what-sticks curatorial approach works at all, let alone results in such jaw-dropping examples of all that photography should embody.

(To avoid unnecessary disappointment, skip his staid personal website.)

Source: Flickr / im_foto

This post is guest curated by azura09:

Hello, I’m azura09 and I’m taking the helm of Acetylene Eyes from May 1-7. We’ve been friends for a number of years and they’re one of people I’m most comfortable talking to about sexuality, gender, and my enthusiasm for porn (both queer and otherwise). I admit that I’m not a photographer and that I have very little working knowledge of what constitutes an artful photograph. Because of this, I’m simply going to focus on images that turn me on and attempt to explain what it is about them that makes me shiver in anticipation. Thanks so much to Acetylene Eyes for allowing me to put my (slightly less refined) taste on display this week.

I’m starting this week off with an image that makes me feel safe.  A kind of safe that seems specifically queer to me, one I’ve never seen straight porn get quite right. It’s that vulnerability that comes with realizing you (and the person you’re with) are on equal footing:

It’s nice to push you down,

make your open your thighs,

 watch you fan your hair out like I got to drown in the best ocean

        to find you, but this isn’t what I need

and I’m telling you, look at all the things you can eat, even as I’m worrying that

I shouldn’t

eat you down to whispering bones.

 queeremmaclaire:

Carson from Crash Pad series with Brooklyn Flaco

Source: msemmaclaire

I hate making my bed. Always have. It’s simple cost-to-benefit analysis there’s no payoff that will ever justify the effort required of the task.

I feel similarly about “unwanted” body hair. Struggling to temporarily erase it takes energy, resources and time and becomes a vicious cycle.

Plus, I think body hair can be really fucking cute.

This image isn’t especially great—the camera is so close to the subject that any substantive context beyond the suggestion of a dark bedroom is lost; the flash renders her skin in tones of pink and way too white, drawing attention to her nipples. too white. (Though the graded shadow edging the outside of her left arm is delightful.)

What made me want to share this is what it made me flashback to…

It was one of those early summer days that plays like a coming attraction reel for high summer when everything is molten and shot-through with bayous of sepia toned sweat and everyone still staggering out of winter wool relishes the sheen of moist second skin as if it were the curious touch of a new lover.

I had been called down to wrangle a printer. (Pro-tip: printers are the swing sets and see-saws of the Devil’s playground meant to occupy idle hands.)

The window unit in the small office was spitting air only just less sweaty than the room.

The administrative staff had migrated to another less sweltering leaving a student to field calls. She was dressed in one of those super thin, nearly threadbare hipster graphic tees and a powder blue floral patterned loose knee-length skirt with yellow accents. It seemed like maybe three months ago she’d shaved the sides of her head to the skin, leaving violent curls to cascade darkly down the left side of her face.

She explained the problem was with the printer and went back to searching for the perfect word to fit the meter of some poetic line flickering before her on her MacBook.

The printer was rightly fucked and I wrestled with it while staring without appearing to stare.

As the printer whirred to life, she yawned and extended her hands above her head—stretching, a dizzyingly sexy fringe of hair peaked out above the edge of her sleeve.

She went back to her poem while finished up with the printer.

We ugly ducklings see the world for all it’s terrible fullness of beauty but it remains for us resolutely untouchable.

Source: gazo-ch.net

Francesca Woodman’s confrontation for confrontation’s sake ethos is very punk rock—unshaven armpits and pubic hair, the gritty B&W; the highly sexualized nature of her work, how that work rigorously thwarts the proprietorial gaze of the traditional male spectator.