PJ’s Blog

Groups of images sometimes rely on images that have no meaning by themselves but have one when confronted with the other images in the group. Those two images are from the “Good girl/bad girl” series which was discussed yesterday and don’t really stand on their own. I’ve realised that in part because in my physical portfolio I only have vertical 8×10 images, so the two horizontal images presented here yesterday are not in there. On the other hand I quite like the series so I kept these two in my portfolio.

People look through my portfolio, which is mainly model photos, both portraits and nudes, and my “nappa” series (bellybutton in finnish), and then, out of the blue, those two pictures of shoes…

And people just don’t get it. I kept the images there because in my mind they are still grouped with the two nudes, but for someone who doesn’t know those horizontal images, those two shoe pictures just look odd, like plucked out of a catalog or an ad campain, and lack all the strength given to them by their association to the two nudes…

Now, the question is of course if those images are needed at all in the group if they cannot stand on their own, and this is open for debate. Can individual images in a strong group be allowed to be weak on their own ?

Today’s images are a pair that are part of a four image set that I presented at my first “real” exhibition. It was one of the first time that I made the images with precisely this idea in mind. The set was called “Good girl / Bad Girl”. Not very deep, I agree, and not very original either, but the point is that even if either images are interesting by themselves, they are strengthened by the use of both of them together.

Now. It’s one of the basics of images presentation that people are usually taught in art school, but it took me a while to get to that point by myself. I still try to get images in coherent groups when I present them, I’ve tried to do that in the galleries on Mamut Photo, and on my personal website, and I am starting to think about my images in series earlier in my creative process, and I have now a number of possible “photographic projects” which involve a number of images and which will be put online or shown once the whole series is done. The polaroid nudes that I did a few weeks ago are along those lines, and I try to keep my eyes opened for new ideas.

Among the photographic “cliches” (it’s strange that I don’t know the actual word for that in english…) that populate the world of erotic and fetish photography, the use of corsets is one that always brings up pretty much the same images.

I like corsets, don’t get me wrong, and it’s not just a male chauvinistic pig kind of thing (though judging by my photographs I’m probably a closet oppressor of women…), but it’s just one of those things that you can photographs in so many ways before become mind-numbingly boring…

In fact it’s the same with many photographic subjects : it’s not because you have made an image, once, that was succesful, that you have to make the same image over and over again (for some reason I have nightmarish images of babies in flowerpots when I say that…(I actually do like some of the work done by Anne Geddes, just not her “baby in flower pot” work…))

Corsets have such a strong “mythological” and symbolic strength in the erotic and fetish world, just like thigh-high stockings, or high-heel shoes, that their use sometimes seem as a cheap substitute for a properly made picture. They are sometimes used to make an image look more “artsy” by taking the image from the simple pornographic and putting it in the fetish…

Now… this has been a fun week, we’ve gone from nudity to pornography, and I haven’t gotten a single piece of hate mail. Maybe I’ll continue the relfection on the subject for a few more days…

I’ve decided to try and get one picture each day with the blog entry. This daily pic will not necessarily be LF, most of them will be taken directly from my website or my archives, but I just like to present a picture every day to discuss my point…

Today I’m going a little further down the “mind’s eye” road with this picture. The printed version is in 16×20″, so the hand is larger than life. It usually takes a few seconds for people to take it in and understand what it is. And when it dawns on them, they usually like it. It is an image that is a classic in erotic and nude photography, and everyone who has worked in those genres has, at some point, done something like it.

If the hand wasn’t there it would be a very unmodest and private portrait, but the fact that you don’t see the outside of the legs, the back of the buttocks, and that the hand is hiding any naughty bits, makes this almost an abstraction, even if the hand and the texture of the skin are very detailed. What this image doesn’t show has to be imagined, and that’s what turns it into an erotic image…

In today’s photographic horizon, one way photographers seem to use to look more “artsy”, is to go down the fetish path. Corsets, high heels, the whole shebang. I’ve stopped counting how many nudes in gas masks I have seen in the last few years, and I’m not on the web full-time looking at fetish photography websites…

Fetish is hard to point down in photography, in theory it is supposed to be about turning non-sexual objects or body part into objects of desire, but erotisation is in the eye of the beholder, and successful fetish photography can be tricky, because it is particularly easy to fall in clichés, and equally easy to fall into the pornographic.

The internet has jumbled many people’s conception of the erotic, and the omnipresence of pornography has “dulled” the erotic sense of many people, and things that might have seemed kinky beyond the conception of many people are now almost mainstream, and the “porno chic” movement of the last decade is a good example of that.

I am still exploring the possibilities of my creative ideas, and I like some of the fetish work that is out there, but I’ve found that I’m usually producing nude images that are too “soft” (not in a focus sense…) to be considered fetish, I’m probably too much of a nice guy…

This simple photo taken with an underwater disposable camera, is among my all-time favorites. It is part of a series of images that I took with a model in a pool. At some point I saw her bikini top floating around and took the snap. I like it because it uses the viewer’s imagination to build a story around that simple piece of fabric. I happened to be working with a model that day but I could have easily taken this image without her, just with her bikini top, and get the same impression : there’s a topless girl in that pool…

It is stretching the concept of suggestion beyond the usual borders, I agree, but the point remains the same. The suggesting of someting gets the mind working, and the mind is our biggest sexual organ, it is where eroticism is detected, and enjoyed.

The borders between artistic nude and erotic nude and pornographic nude are all in the eye and the mind of the beholder. I saw a movie recently titled “Moulin Rouge” (no, the the one with Nicole Kidman, the one from 1952 with Zsa-Zsa Gabor…), which is about the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. At one point in the movie, in a gallery, a woman is looking at a picture of a girl in underwear and corset, with a man looking at her. The woman says to Toulouse-Lautrec : “How dare you paint such filth, she’s undressing in front of that man, that’s disgusting….”, To which Toulouse replies : “She is not undressing she is getting dressed, and the man is her husband, and they are about to go out to dinner to celebrate their 27th wedding anniversary, so I would not have you speak like that about such repectable people…” …

Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder…

Today we’ll go back by about a century to look at the history of nude photography. From it’s origins, photography has been closely linked to painting. Mainly because many early photographers were also painters, and also because one of the uses of photography was to provide “models” for painters to work from. Many early nudes have elaborate setups and themes, and follow closely on the esthetics of classical painting. A whole movement of photographers, called pictorialists, were using deliberate alterations of the photographs to make them look like paintings, in their eyes, it was more “artistic” to do it this way. Nudes made this way, with mythological themes, and painting-like appearances were easier to swallow as “art”, you might say.

But a movement in the beginning of the 20th century started to oppose that tendency. The core thoughts of this movement were centered around the fact that photography wasn’t painting and that is should stand on it’s own as an interesting medium because it could show reality as it is. Weston’s “Pepper no.30″ is a core image in that movement, taking an element of reality and using it “as is” to create a stunning image.

Edward Weston made a number of nudes of his wife (like my image of yesterday was of my wife…), that were not very well received in his day. They were seen as too erotic, too real, in some way, to be considered and accepted. By today’s standards, Weston’s images are not scandalous, and maybe that’s a good sign that as a society we are collectively moving towards acceptance of nudity, and healthier vision of sexuality. It’s a good thing because in my mind when something as central to our lives as sexuality is repressed and taboo-ized, it can only bring problems, frustrations, violence, even, in some cases. But I’m sorry to say that we have still a long way to go…

People’s attitude towards nude images is linked to the socio-politico-religio-cultural reality of those people’s time, and the current way of thinking is likely to change again and again during the next decades, I just hope that Weston’s nudes will never go back to the “scandalous” category…

What’s wrong with this picture ? Nothing important, if you ask me, but other people might think otherwise : this is not an “artistic” nude, strictly speaking. It’s just a woman, nude. There seems to me no compositional effort to use her body as an achitectural and graphic element. There is no erotic undertone, no explicit or implicit sensuality beyond what you see on the image. It’s in color, so the usual excuse of black and white being more artistic cannot be used.

It’s just a nude woman. And furthermore she’s looking straigt at the camera, and she’s smiling. People are not allowed to smile in artistic nudes, people smile in erotic images…

It’s just a nude portrait. It’s a genre that is not widely used, unfortunately, because of the usual stigmatas of sex associated with nudity. Eye contact in a nude photograph is usually done with sexual intent. Many figure photos don’t show the model’s face, and some don’t even show her head. I’ve always had a tough time cutting the head off a model, sometimes it works for the image, but sometimes the need to preserve the model’s anonymity restricts the images that can be made.

When we shoot I don’t know, a tree, or a house, or a city, or a mountain, we don’t usually hide or have to hide where it is or what it is. How come we have to hide the identity of a person ? Why is it so hiddeous to pose nude that some people’s carrer are in jeopardy if nude images of them are publicized ? Why is it so important for paparazzi to get that one shot of this of that celebrity topless on the beach ? Do I really have to mention the “nipplegate” ?

I know I ask many questions and i don’t answer them, because the answer to all those questions is burried into our cultural codes. It’s piece of software than contains our religious and cultural beleifs into the fact that nudity is wrong, and therefore should remain anonymous.

Look at this model in the eye, and tell me what’s wrong with this picture…

This image is “olympia”, a famous painting by Manet. It was really badly received in his day, because of that look the model has in the direction of the viewer, the fact that she seems to be in control, that she’s “real”…

The more things change, the more they stay the same… Photography is facing the same issues as painting, as any art form in fact. A painting of a nude is fine as long as it’s not too real, people can always imagine that the painter made up someone in their heads and painted using only their imagination. An image like this one by Manet, or a photograph, puts you in front of the reality of things : someone was nude in front of the artist for him to produce this image. Someone got naked. And that’s the thing that troubles a lot of people…

Here is a reflection sent to me by Kate Mahoney, a photographer who works with nudes :

“The erotic photo is the nude in repose, amorphous, academic (the nude of the painting studio and sculpture gallery), it is rather the suggestion, the dissimulation of pornography. The pornographic is the dynamic and debauched nude, coarse, insensitive, hot-blooded. The erotic photograph is in black and white; the pornographic takes on colour, with pink predominating; and the participants hair is always damp. The erotic photograph is clean and noble, the pornographic, dirty and trivial. The erotic photograph is often expensive, it is printed on good paper, it can be displayed, hung without shame. The pornographic photograph is printed on glossy paper that creates reflections; we hide it, use it, and then throw it away; we mishandle it, soil it. A model for an erotic photograph must be beautiful, the lighting should be suitable. The subject for pornography can easily be imperfect, paunchy, heís only one element in a carnal mechanism, a face, a model in a catalogue. His is a cut-rate body (a discounted body, the body shown in a magazine is always less expensive than one in a brothel)

But the boundary between the erotic and the pornographic is more problematic; it has to do with commerce. The pornographic is that which is not touched by art (or grace). Many pictures of nudes are sold for the body they represent rather than for the photograph itself. They are sold under the pretext and the protection of art. The erotic photograph can be framed, the pornographic comes wrapped in cellophane, like meat in the supermarket.”

Like the writer of this piece, Herve Guibert, I realise that the erotic is a hyper-cleansed model of the pornographic, a kind of sanitised prurience which is licensed by the label of art. But the erotic is also livening, vitalising and engaging. It is contradictory and layered, at once one of the great motivators of human endeavour, and at the same time a sign of our biological animal nature. I think it is a sign of my passion for the visual that my work is erotic.

Now there are a number of things said by M.Guibert that made me cringe, but those are things he said in the 70s, when the border between the erotic and the pornographic were better defined than today. Today, magazines offering flesh on glossy paper abound, and some actually present images that are photographically interesting, even if the main focus is anatomy and gynecology, more often than not. With the over abundance of pornographic material on the internet, can a nude image be seen in an artistic eye, or has pornography ruined the show for the rest of us ?

With erotic photography moving toward the explicit, the fetish, and pornography retreating into harder and harder sex, is there still a line between the two ? An interesting movement on the internet is represented by Simple Nudes, which :

Basically it means nude art without anything much added. If the images are artistic, they are only so to a degree that does not interfere with the beauty of the model. And if the images are erotic, they are so as an undertone, not the main purpose, and they are not so to a degree that that overwhelms the experience of the beauty of the model.

This is actually a movement that I try to be a part of, but it’s somewhat odd that someone had to start something like that. Nudity is the most natural state, in my opinion, and yet we have to codify it and define it and give deeper meanings to it…

We’ll continue that tomorrow I guess…

There are many ways to take a picture of a person, and many of them involve them wearing clothes. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact I rather like to portraiture. I’ve tried my hand at many styles of photography, but in the last few years I realized that my best images were studio nudes…

I’m not entirely sure why that is, but i have more ideas, I’m more comfortable working with a nude model than doing a portrait shoot. Inspiration comes to me easier, because I tend to look at the body as almost an architectural element, and lightning being a critical part of bringing that physical element to life.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that I’ve been wearing glasses for as long as I remember, and being short sighted I have a closer close focus point than “normal” people, but I tend to love fine textures, I love to touch, and I try to convey that sense of touch in the images I make. I try to make the image feel real, to make it palpable. This is one of the reasons for my taste for larger formats, since some subtleties of tones and details are best rendered in larger formats.

A photograph tends to show us more that what we see in real life, and that’s the reason why portrait photographers have had a tendency to use softer-focus lenses, to tone down the hyper-realism of photographs. And that’s why fashion photographers re-touch every image to make it perfect, because details catch the eye in a photograph, whereas in real life, face to face with a person, we tend to see the general appearance and not necessarily focus on the details.

Now, what does it have to do with me doing nude photographs ? I like flesh. There, I said it. It’s an horrible thing to say for an artist, because it brings undertones of pornography and of shameful social taboos that are rather silly, when you think about it… I like the human body, I think it’s a beautiful thing that needs to be celebrated and shown, and admired. It is the primal building block of our lives and identities, and I really don’t mind that hundreds of thousands of photographers around the world are doing the same.

So, here’s my why…