Hi DrTang,
I really enjoy your work.
Unfortunately, your links to the work do not work in either Firefox or Safari.
- Leigh
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Hi DrTang,
I really enjoy your work.
Unfortunately, your links to the work do not work in either Firefox or Safari.
- Leigh
I think it is very difficult to do a photograph with a nude aspect to the theme.
If a portrait is it a picture of a face with a nipple on show; which is the subject; is the composition made to flatter the portrait face or with the predetermined fact that the nudity must be incorporated and the face fit around it.
It seems to me that nudes need to make sense (as do all photographs) in that the subject must seem plausible in presentation and composition directed to the subject.
There needs to be a reason for the nude to be plunked on to the rock or for the hand to cup the breast in the portrait of a face.
Not to discount the form of light on skin as art, but just one subject at a time please
There is quite the model-industry (Model Mayhem, for example) to be considered. Workshops, too. Not an overly large industry, but pervasive. Some students help with college expenses by modeling for university art classes. A profession almost as old as paint. Nudes have been an exercise for art students for as long as there has been art students. Tradition and all that.
I will not run down anyone working with nudes, but I just hope the images are made respectfully and do not treat people as objects.
Comes up fine with Foxfire 48. and OS 10.6.8
If you are accessing from work, your system admin might be blocking.
.
shows up on mine too im on safari ..
Frankly, the world does not need more pictures of pretty girls without their garments. And the nude in art would seem a desperately tired genre that has run out of things to say. But amazingly it isn't so in at least two ways.
The nude remains an eternal metaphoric space in which aspects of the human condition can be explored and commented upon. The unclad figure, taken out of humdrum context, becomes every-man or every-woman at any time or at all times. If you have a broad visual statement to make about humanity, uncluttered by the here-and-now, the particular, and the picayune, then the nude is what you should use.
It is a blessing born of long tradition that most people are familiar with the nude in art. They can accept the surface view, "this is so and so with their clothes off", and then pass beyond to read the underlying message. The tension between the nude as carnal and the nude as sublime has existed for a long time. Praxiteles (4th Century BCE) knew this when carved his Aphrodite for the city fathers of Knidos and employed his mistress, the famous courtesan Phryne, as the model. The city fathers were embarrassed (some knew Phryne "commercially") and grumpy but they paid Praxiteles fee and the statue became the most famous Aphrodite ever. Photography can likewise celebrate the clash between eros, as felt, and logos, as thought, and it can do it with wit and wisdom.
The second celebration of the nude that will never run dry is celebration of real beauty for its own sake. I think of "What a piece of work is man... Hamlet, Act 2, scene II" and assert that if we cannot admire our common humanity at its best then we fully deserve the miseries of body-denying asceticism. Heaven forfend! Beauty beyond the cliches of fashion and celebrity is everywhere and everywhere fading. The photographer's tout accosting women in the street with "C'mon luv have yer pitcher done. You'll never look more beautiful than today" spoke more truth than he knew. The ancient tombstone inscription "As you are now so once was I. As I am now you soon shall be" is grimly true as well. It is absolutely legitimate to use the photographic time machine to capture beauty in the here and now, a face, a nude, a sentiment carnal or chaste, and defend it against an uncaring past and an uncertain future.
My casual observations of photo-culture indicate photographers and nude models have sexual encounters more often than chance would allow. And it’s not through severe moral laxity from either party. People who model nude tend to be attractive, to be self-aware, and to be confident in projecting their attractiveness. Photographers tend to be highly responsive to exactly that same visual attractiveness. (That's why they become photographers in the first place.) The scene is set and human nature sometimes follows through. Harm or no, audiences titter.
There are exemplary figures in the art of the nude: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, all serious and intellectual, and Helmut Newton, all fun and naughty games, who never jumped the camera (ok, AFAIK). But even here a suspicion of prurience clings. It comes with the territory, it’s often unfair, and some people can’t abide it. Ansel Adams never photographed nudes but enjoyed looking at Edward Weston’s efforts.
A photograph of the nude is a conspiracy between the model and the photographer. It is not iron-clad certain every time who rules, the model or the photographer. Perhaps the ladies or the guys are performance artists who culminate their art by inveigling a man or woman with a camera, a factotum, to give their talent permanent form.
If one of the requirements for justifiably taking a picture is that the world needs another photo of....., then few of us would be taking very many pictures, whether of a nude, landscape, or anything else.
Maris, you wrote well. Yours words ring true to me.
Art is often debated and sometimes not enough.
For the record, your nudes are sublime.
I gaze. :)