Originally Posted by
Duane Polcou
Zoe:
Pure hatred? How I posted that was tongue-in-cheek, I thought it was hilarious. Must be a Jersey thing.
People in LA have no sense of humor. Tattoos and earthquakes. It's like being shipwrecked on Krakatoa but the natives all have agents.
This is not only a great forum for learning. It is a great forum for sarcasm, humor, baiting, condecension, pettiness, egotism, glad-handing of and to those who should not quit their day job, gear-headedness, comeraderie, opinionism, and the ad nauseum use of the phrase "Are you on crack?"
My point is that homo sapiens have an instantaneous, sub-concious, and involuntary mental reaction to seeing nudity which has as it's root sexual reproduction. This reaction may not always lead to arousal, it may not take the form of action or aggression, but it is one of assessment.
Is this person male or female? Are they old or young? Are they attractive to me or unattractive to me? People who claim that they only see "beauty" in nudity, as though their reaction is on the same level as viewing a sunset, and deny any sexual thought process, are basically saying they've found a way to override millions of years of patterned behavior ingrained as part of our reproductive agenda. Simply put, I just do not believe them.
But certain people seem to think that the only correct response to "fine art nude photography" is one of the appreciation of beauty and the respect of artistic message, and should sex enter the equation, you are somehow a clueless pervert.
The artistic dialogue is just that, a dialogue between creator and viewer. Jock Sturges is most likely a very intelligent man. I find it difficult to believe that he would not assume or even consider that a percentage of his collector base consists of those whose' eventual response to images of nude children is one of arousal. In effect, despite his purely artistic intentions, he is contributing material to be consumed by these individuals. If he denies this, then he is telling the world how they should respond to his work rather than accepting he has no control over it.
You have a zillion ways of getting your message across. You can photograph anything and everything present in this world. But if you choose nudity as part of your visual process and pretend to negate a sexual component then you must have God or Marvel Comics on speed dial because you have super powers. And it's those people who shake their finger at me about mentioning sex that I find hypocritical. I don't hate them. I just think they're full of their own crap.