Tag: young

It’s not without some profound reservations that I am posting this image. There are a host of things that are problematic about it: the indeterminate age of the young woman who could be older than she appears but given the doll and her bracelet probably isn’t. Add the random detritus strewn about the background along with the lurid reflected flash and there’s no denying the unsettling vibe– like some sick fuck uncle is directing his niece for a camera in Grandma Gardenia’s basement.

All that is an enormous put off for me–I know and care deeply about too many friends who have weathered such abuse. But I keep coming back to this image. Beyond everything fucked with it, something about it resonates with me.

A Google Image search returns a single hit for this: a 2009 blog post by a young Swedish woman who gravitates toward the macabre.

This does not exactly set my mind at ease regarding questions of exploitation but the text accompanying the image in the aforementioned post amplifies the resonance I feel towards this image:

Sen lekte vi med dockor.

För det var det som väntades av oss.

(Then we played with dolls.

For that was what was expected of us.)

There are two sides to expectation: what is expected of one and what one expects of oneself–I am expected to play with dolls but I don’t want to play with them or play with them in the way that is customary.

The starker the dichotomy, the greater the feeling of bodily frustration–a deep navel throbbing for physicality, no matter how self-destructive, anything to achieve even a moment’s peace.

A body with only anger to hold it– knows to trust the ruptures; wherever lies the greatest weakness, there also is the greatest need. In such moments the tang of plastic melting into the curled tip of a tongue is so empty and wrong that something has to rush in to fill the space–something no less hopeful because it is broken beyond repair.

Source: swickd-blog-blog

kalkibodhi:

Encouragement request

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EDIT I: it has been brought to my attention that the young woman in this image is Kristine Kahill and that this image was originally posted on Sex and Submission (a Kink.com imprint). Sex and Submission interviews models before and after the sessions. In other words, explicit consent is given for the acts depicted in the subsequent images.

Furthermore, it seems the post can be read as suggesting being submissive is a ‘reprehensible’ behavior. I assure you, that was never my intention. As someone who is thoroughly hardwired as a switch–I am not down on D/s practices at all.

I am opting to leave the original post untouched. I make mistakes. And I am sorry if my comments offended anyone. It still concerns me, however, that this image is presented entirely disconnected from its original context. In the future I will make every effort to do better due diligence. That being said, all things being equal I do stand by my reading of the problematic aspects of this image as it originally presented to me.

EDIT II: Also, I neglected to mention this is some straight-up #skinnyframebullshit.

TinEye turns up two ‘matches’ for this: both in color, both cropped and both hosted by purveyors of violent porn.

But anything more than a glance reveals as much: the composition of the image says as clearly as if the image maker had drafted a memo and sent it to every viewer: women are nothing more than props existing for the sole purpose of accommodating male desire.

It’s a reprehensible ideology. And this picture does almost nothing for me.

Except the young woman’s face, hairstyle and how her eyes accentuate her expression bears more than passing resemblance to an erstwhile co-worker on whom I have a crush.

It’s not the first time I’ve chanced upon porn which reminds me of people I trust—and by that I merely mean someone who can touch me without causing me to flinch. Usually, I avert my eyes—much the way I would if a loose fitting top gaps and offers a glimpse of an elicit vista. It’s not that I don’t want to see—fucking Christ on Christmas, I exist to absorb sensory input.

I don’t feel the same inclination here, however; it’s a feeling that I am interested in explaining without judgment or justification—not because either does not belong here but because this response is such a fatherfucking anomaly.

Navigating boundaries is something for which I lack any talent. I don’t really understand them because for all intents and purposes I do not have any of my own. But I comprehend—at least academically—that other people do. I think of boundaries as privacy force fields. (Go ahead and laugh.) Privacy force fields are like whatever it is about a door that prevents a vampire from passing without being invited.

Looking down the front of a loose blouse or connecting a pornographic image with someone I trust usually causes me to feel like a vampire trying to enter a home without being invited.

It’s the same with masturbatory fantasies. Granted when I masturbate I don’t usually think about scenarios or exchanges so much as the process is something more like meditation or stretching my arm through cage bars towards a hanging key I can almost just reach.

On the occasions where I please myself while fantasizing about someone, it’s as a rule never someone with whom I am close. (Of course it’s a different story if the person consents—but this has only happened once with someone show I was never romantically involved.)

There are two notable exceptions. One is my crush.

Perhaps it’s not really an exception. I don’t fantasize about how she might touch me, how I might touch her in turn and where that might lead. Instead I try to picture her in the same room as me—she’s one of those women whose fundamental perception is of being unattractive. She’s not upset about it; in fact, she cultivates an image of herself as not being able to give less of a fuck of what anyone else thinks of her. Of course, this in combination with her vicious wit, talent and intelligence makes her even more attractive. Then I am in the same cell again stretching, reaching for, almost touch that hanging key that if I can only reach will unlock a treasure chest with a mirror that if she held up she could glimpse herself as I see her through my eyes.

Then I fall away, crawl back but fail.

I don’t know why I refuse to turn away in this case. But in so doing, I remain unashamed.

kalkibodhi:

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Sans attribution, there are two directions guesses at credit for any photograph featuring young nudist women can go: David Hamilton or Jock Sturges.

And despite being in color this bears none of Hamilton’s idyllic, dreamy soft focus.

The large-format aspect ratio points to Sturges despite the fact that he works almost exclusively in B&W.

Also, I am pretty familiar with his work and I cannot recall an instance where the subject whose eyes were wide open was this close to the camera without staring directly into the lens.

Further, although Sturges favors vertical compositions to echo the people standing within his frames, this vertical orientation is skillfully contrapuntal, delicately diminishing the horizontal force of the pose by balancing the negative space in the doorway against the blue wooden slats.

All in all, this contains altogether more calculation than I expect from Sturges’ knee-jerk fine art-photographer-as-gilded-voyeur routine.

But it’s the un-self-conscious mien of the model—who, although nude, appears not as a sexualized object so much as a spectrum of being that includes the possibility of sexuality. Such presence in both one’s own skin and a moment has a definite parallel with Sally Mann’s wonderful Immediate Family.

William Eggleston – Two Girls on Couch 1976

When photographers gather and conversation turns as it will to Eggleston, you hear a lot of talk about color. After all, the man all but made color photography a meritorious visual art medium single-handedly.

What everyone misses in the justified fuss and bustle over grand spectacle of color is just how deliciously subversive the work is—rich with subtly deviant, transgressive flourishes.

Take the Red Ceiling: check out the poster edge stretching into the lower left corner of the frame; and how damn fucking creepy is this one yet you don’t stop to think about that because the print is so warm, mellow and aesthetically pleasing.

Eggleston is unrivaled in inciting within the spectator an understanding of why—visually speaking—the photo was taken without being aware that such understand implicates the spectator in the artist’s gleeful disdain for anything conventional.

Yes, Two Girls on Couch is not overtly sexual. At the same time, it is not asexual. It focuses on a slippery intimacy, how crossing that perilous bridge over the chasm of puberty changes our instincts with regard to bodily relationship to others.

The fluidity of girl-childhood and femininity in a shimmering ghostly game of leap frog. Customary lines of communication shorting, reconnecting, fading. Being your self to another no longer fits as well, pinches at the seams, effort a new ingredient to produce the same old recipe.

If this possessed the sumptuous colors of Eggleston’s dye transfer prints, the voyeurism of these girls intimacy would read as a leering older man fetishizing a moment he is outside.

Make no mistake such undertone belongs here even though it has been carefully diminished with harsh lighting (a single overhead bulb?)—atypical in Eggleston’s oeuvre. By checking the customarily sumptuous color, the focus shifts away from the artist’s craft and more toward the immediacy of the moment. 

This is not porn. It isn’t exactly transgressive either. But to not recognize the way it edgily toes the line is to miss at least half of what is at work here.

I dig the shit out of edgy. All the better when the craft is fucking impeccable.

How much wonder do we miss?

As if wonder is snow & we are all kids staring up at a smoke grey sky, our mouths wide with waiting for that quick, crystalline tang to kiss our tongues.

For each kiss we catch, how many do we miss?

But, isn’t wonder everywhere— 

In the way shy surrender to the certainty of needing tinges the lids of eyes & cheeks with a pink pre-blush patina.

& afternoon light softens the bare, oft-hidden skin below the smooth up-tilt of a chin.  

Wonder: the finger slid slyly between lips & teeth—careful to touch nothing.