Pillage and Plunder

As we all know, I’m married to a Viking. My very own hunky barbarian is a very typical Norseman warrior. He’s big, hairy (?) and loves to drink and fight (the latter refers to activities purely confined to the dojo of course) and most folks wisely tend to avoid arguing with him. He’s also a mite too fond of the laydeez, especially after a few sups of real ale… he’s hardwired that way. Oh yes, the wild Viking genes are particularly prominent in our dear Mr Fluffy.

But the latest historical research on Viking history by Cambridge University tells me that I’m being overly harsh with regard to my dear partner. The Vikings have been misrepresented, so they say. In fact all this rape, pillage and plundering was a tad overdone….a simple case of misunderstanding as a result of a smear campaign against our dear Norwegian brothers. The Vikings were actually a peaceful people, concerned largely with trade and colonization. Apparently they were not only stylish trend-setters who were highly fashion orientated (flared breeches and horned helmets being their contributions to the Viking Vogue magazines of the time) but they were also gifted artists. Illustration and creativity were very high on their agenda, and they produced some stunning art in their time.

In fact, the Cambridge researchers assure me that far from being illiterate warring thugs who were obsessed with fighting and dragging off pretty women, in actual fact Vikings were part of a highly advanced society who were deeply concerned with integrating into community life. Apparently even their womanizing ways were just a result of bad publicity, and in truth they were dedicated family men who rarely strayed away from their wives and never so much as looked at another woman.

Yeah right.

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Our resident barbarian and his adoring HoneyB

And in case you’re wondering, yes I’m afraid that I did indeed shoot this. Truly I am a numpty of biblical proportions, not to mention a terrible photographer.

Critical reviews of this astounding piece of high art from beloved friends and family range from “Mine eyes! Mine eyes!” to “That’s just nasty.”

It’s at this point when a woman must face the unvarnished truth and realize that photography is not her defining gift in life, and she should really just stick to writing about it instead.

Nude, naked and everything in-between

“To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen by others.”
John Berger

“Is Richard photographing naked women again?” asked my mother-in-law disapprovingly a couple of weeks ago. She asks this question periodically in the vain hope that he’s given up photography.

“Yes he is, and by the way, the ladies in question are nude, not naked,” I corrected sternly.

She looked at me blankly. “What’s the difference?” she asked.

Hmm. Good question. We talk about nudes a heck of a lot in the photographic bloggie world. Technically nude and naked are synonyms. They both mean “without clothing.” However there are fundamental differences between the two, depending on how or when you use them. It’s all dependent on your state of mind, you see.

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HoneyB

In common usage, nude is used in an artistic context. I don’t advertise myself as a naked model because that would sound vaguely rude. I would describe myself as a nude model. The implication here is that nude has no lewd connotation. It sounds classier, innocent, untainted by sexual intent. A nude is seen by others as a beautiful man or woman who exudes confidence and self-knowledge. If you pose nude, you are sure of yourself, at one with your natural body shape, you are not ashamed of being unclothed. Au contraire, you revel in it, you are using your beauty and confidence for the higher purpose of creating art. Nudes are therefore elevated to a higher level, a representation of immortality. In ancient Greece, nude statues of Goddesses did not represent ordinary females, rather they depicted super-women. The emphasis was on perfection and form rather than an individual’s characteristics or physical sexuality.

On the other hand naked has more of a personal edge and implies a more carnal element. If I left a note for Rich saying, “Come upstairs, I’m nude” he’d assume I was in the studio waiting for a shoot, but if instead I wrote, “Come upstairs, I’m naked” he’d zip-up to the bedroom quicker than you could say “hot, nekkid and juicy.” See what I mean? In this context naked has a more erotic feel to it, a naughtier and more forbidden element. It certainly doesn’t imply art.

Whether or not we sexualise it, I do think that the word naked can be somewhat disturbing because it reminds us of our own mortality and our limitations. Used in a non-sexual and more innocent context, it reminds us that we were all born naked, vulnerable and frail, not only physically but psychically unprotected too. Think of the phrase “the naked truth” which means stripped of bias or exposing the reality of a situation. When we are naked we are laid bare, the mask is taken off and we are our real true selves.

Now let’s consider another example:

This afternoon I may well go outside to do some gardening. As it is warm outside, I will doubtless be weeding the garden whilst stark naked. As I’m not currently in the best ever physical shape, I’ll be letting it all hang out. It won’t be pretty. Later on I might take a shower, pour myself a glass of chardonnay and hopefully nip upstairs to the studio for a shoot. I’ll then point my toes, suck my stomach in, assume a sultry expression, try not to drool, and pray that Rich is genius enough to rustle up a photo which portrays me as the gorgeous nude model L-von-B which I’m certainly not “in real life.” At no time will I be wearing clothes, but both scenarios are very different because both the context and the intent are different. The first scene is the truth (me in the garden, naked, personal, the individual body stripped bare), the second is a manufactured fantasy image, almost inhuman, where I am just a model, an object of art rather than a person, a mere tool used to convey an artistic message of light, form and (cough) perfection. Thanks to the photographer’s abilities, I am transformed from an ordinary flabby mother of three into something other than I really am.

IMO, this profound charge between these two states is primarily a psychological development. As Donald Kuspit said in The Troubling Nude, the transformation from nakedness into nudity is “a spiritual change…the naked body conveys the state of the soul before the change, the nude body conveys its condition afterwards.”

If by now you’re getting a bit bewildered by all of this, don’t worry, you’re not alone. This highly important and life-changing debate has been discussed by the finest minds for centuries, and modern scholars are still arguing about it. Nude v. naked sure sounds easy enough when you consider my garden/art-nude scenario above, but sometimes it’s not quite as clear-cut as that.

Now let’s all take a moment to consider the following vaguely glamoury image of the boobalicious HoneyB.

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Honey's Beautiful Boobies

(Aside: yes I know you’re all shocked right out of your chairs right now, and I do understand your amazement as this is clearly not our resident artiste’s usual tasteful B+W fine-art style, but Rich did take it I assure you. What can I say? The man has hidden depths. Or not, as the case may be.)

Now if you can tear your eyes away from Honey playing with her…er…mighty mammaries, let me leave you with this burning question. Bearing in mind the relevance of context and intent, is she naked or nude?

The Fluffy House of Amityville

I woke up this morning, went downstairs and discovered the walls were bleeding alien blood.

No kidding. Bright green goo was leaking out the electric light sockets and dripping down the walls. This resulted in me rushing around the house at warp speed screaming, “The house is possessed! We’re all gonna die!” (I must admit I’ve always harbored a secret desire to do that, so it was strangely satisfying.) The kids were unmoved, and Rich ignored me. Alas, yet another normal day in the Fluffy household.

Anyhoo, Rich dissected the sockets and discovered that our prehistoric wiring was coated in some sort of ancient insulating glue, which was slowly dissolving and leaking down the walls.

I’m not convinced. It’s because I stepped inside a church for the first time in three years last Sunday. It’s a sign, I know it’s a sign.

Of course the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets turned on tomorrow. That might have something to do with it. Coincidence, or are we all doomed?

Maybe we’re all gonna get sucked into a black hole, as Stephen suggested.

If indeed the end is nigh as my walls seem to prophesize, I'd just like to say that it’s been great knowing you folks! So long and thanks for all the fish. I’m gonna spend my last night on earth getting drunk and having sex.

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Toast and Honey are the condemned man's ideal final meal

(Rich says he’s not going to dignify this superstitious nonsense with an answer and he’s refusing to be associated with such utter tosh. Apart from the sex bit – he seems quite keen on that.)

See ya tomorrow.

Limbo lower now

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Honey doing the limbo

I’ve decided to stop modelling to “higher.” The whipped cream shot in my previous post will be the last you see of my “bits” for a long while. Cries of relief all round, I’m sure.

Don’t get me wrong, these shots were a lot of fun to create, and mucking around in the studio with Rich at weekends with a bottle of wine was immensely relaxing for both of us. And the images were kindly received which was a pleasant ego boost for me too (not that I needed it - my ego is supersized already), but…there is always a butt…

I didn’t shoot pussy shots to get comments, I didn’t shoot them to shock, or arouse others or be “out there” and I didn’t shoot them because I thought they were art either (I have no idea if they qualify as art and frankly I don’t care.) I didn’t need adulation (although that is always nice, but I’d much have my ego stroked for my writing thanks, not my groin.) So why did I shoot nothing but erotica for the best part of a year? Did this photographic genre reflect my personality? To some extent yes, I do have a saucy British side, and I can be incredibly rude (naughty-rude rather than verbally offensive although no doubt I’m guilty of that too) but horny porny Lin is not really who I am (unless you get me completely plastered in which case all bets are off and BTW I totally deny everything.)

If I’m being completely honest with myself, the real reason I shot erotica was a psychological reaction against my cancer. It was a rebellion, a way of fighting it. Porn was my weapon. Exposing my ass (literally) to my disease was my way of saying “fuck you Big C, I’m going to beat this, and there’s nothing anyone or anybody (especially my crappy body) can do to stop me.”

But then I got nuked and took six months off modelling. Incapacitated in hospital, and then at home, I had nothing to occupy my mind and so I started to study photography and the reasons behind it, and consequently I changed. I’m not saying anything as corny as “I grew”, but I did discover new and exciting reasons why photographs evolved, why photographers thought as they did and the reasons behind the creation of their art.

My lifelong obsession, my raison d'être if you like, has always been a fascination with people, who they are and why they think as they do. Nude photography (and indeed all photography) is fundamentally about people. A photograph (good or bad) will tell you way more about the creator of the photograph than it ever will about what the photographer thinks he is showing you. You just need to know how to look. My six months off modelling, which was largely spent reading about photography, really gave me a good kick up the ass and made me re-evaluate who I was and what my priorities were. It taught me as much about myself as it did about the photographers I was studying, probably more. And most importantly, along the way I learned to really see a photograph. And that new understanding fundamentally changed the entire way I looked at the world. It changed Lin, the person.

Do I regret that explicit modelling phase, most of the results of which you’ve never seen and now probably never will? Not for one moment. For one, the making of them will make good stories. Secondly they were fun, as well as a way of losing myself and forgetting the psychological and physical crap I was going through. Thirdly they tested the limits of what I was prepared to show of myself to the world, and if you don’t experience your limits, explore that side of yourself, how are you ever going to know what makes you tick?

But I don’t need that weapon any more. I don’t need to fight my disease because I’ve accepted it as part of me. I’ll always love modelling (particularly the wackier stuff) and I’m still going to do it because helping to create photos (note I’m not using the word “art”) is a lot of fun, and it makes Rich and I happy to spend time together mucking around with a camera. But my desire to model no longer goes deeper than that, I’m afraid. Fun should be enough of a motivation, at least for me.

For me personally there are more important things to do than use my dodgy modelling as therapy (although it does work) and there’s much more to life than showing my hairy old crotch to the world. I don’t have time to be ill. I have more important things to do: Living (one day at a time), breathing (in and out), writing (little and often) and most importantly, loving. I’m rather good at that last one, even if I do say so myself.

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You can never have too much Honey.

Erotica: The thinking Person’s Porn

Too often, I have found that people label what they find offensive or crass "porn," while anything they find sexy gets the more romantic label of "erotica." One person's pornography is another's erotica!

Sage Vivant

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It’s taken me a whole two years, but I’m finally persuading Rich to dabble in the dark side. He’s finally having a bash at shooting erotica (with models other than me, I mean.) You’ll note that I don’t use the word “porn” because Rich says he doesn’t do porn, and he gets VERY annoyed if I refer to his work as porn, which I do, frequently, because frankly I don’t see much of a difference. What’s in a label? If a photograph turns you on, does it really matter what it’s called?

Well, apparently it does, according to Rich. He says that it’s like looking at the difference between implied nude and real nude – erotica implies the sexual act rather than shows the sexual act. It’s all about getting the balance right between fantasy and reality.

On the other hand I would describe erotica as high-class porn, shot with dramatic lighting and lots of visible emotion and sensuality. It’s sophisticated porn, but with a story, feelings, a psychological element, although the purpose is the same: to get the viewer hot ‘n’ juicy.

By now most of you will be asking, does anybody actually care whether an image is classified as erotica or porn? Well yes, most photographers DO care very much. They want their images to be erotic so that they are perceived by the general public to be photographers not pornographers. It’s all about photographers being concerned with themselves, how they want to be seen and how they see themselves, whereas it should be about what they shoot. Many photographers are too concerned with how they appear to others (they must be thought of as “respectable photographers”) and not enough with using their skills and imaginations to push their boundaries and realise their erotic creative vision. Is it edgy? Can I shoot edgy but not porn? Is it classy? Does it show too much? Not enough? Is it tasteful? And so on…too much worry about the self-image rather than the end-image.

It makes me wonder what would happen if photographers just stopped thinking about their self image for a moment, and let their emotions fly? If they stepped outside their personal comfort zones, indulged their imaginations and see what happens? Personally I would love to see the results. I suspect the photographs produced would be awesome.

Unfortunately there’s no chance of Rich doing that (just yet anyway) as he’s rather shy, and truth be told, he’s taking it slowly because he’s new at this genre and (by his own admission) erotica requires a completely different photographic puzzle to solve. With Rich, it’s forever about lighting above all-else, and he says that’s something he needs to develop over time. It’s easy to do the dramatic single light from the side of course, but trying to induce a more sophisticated emotional mood through light, without crossing the line into porn (which for him is unacceptable) is proving a consuming challenge.

It’s not all about lighting of course. The pose and expression of the model is important, but it’s also critical to think about the story. A successful photograph is about the message above all else. This is where it gets complex because viewers may perceive erotica and porn differently according to their own subjective opinions and personal tastes. In particular, men and women view erotica differently because they think differently. If women get turned on by ideas and more psychological elements of the scene, men are more visual, so the secret is to ensure your story appeals to both. In order to achieve a powerful erotic photograph, all these elements have to come together at just the right time, for that split second, in order to create that image which will push the right emotional buttons of your viewers. Erotica is all about stimulation of the mind rather than the body, and leaving that viewer desperately wanting to see just that little bit more…

One thing is for sure, if photographers stopped obsessing about what is acceptable and tasteful so much, they'd get a lot further with their erotic photography. Ultimately the classification attributed to your photograph is unimportant. What is important is that you stop worrying about what others think of you because all that will do is get in the way of your creative vision.

Let your mind go and your photography will follow.

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Images are of HoneyB of course. Rich isn’t sure if he "crossed the line" into porn with that last shot. Personally I think he worries about lines too much. Just keep shooting, and the rest will take care of itself.

Cropping Conundrums

Apologies if I come across as an idiot newbie in this post, but that’s exactly what I am, so I’m relying on you splendid chaps to put me straight.

It is one of photography’s fundamental truths that most photographs do not appear at their best straight out of a camera. To make your photos look better, they usually require some element of “fiddling” before they’re finished. Now fiddling fascinates me, the photographic type I mean.

Rich reckons I’ve developed a dangerous mental condition known as “cropping obsession.” Alas, no whipping involved, I’m talking about the compositional kind. I’ve been fascinated with composition for a while now, and have been analysing it in excruciating and torturous detail (torturous for Rich, not me, because he has to answer my endless questions) and my life is now lived so much according to The Rule Of Thirds that it’s creeping into everyday life. I’m even placing the focal point of my cakes off centre [birthday candles must never go in the centre of the cake, as this shows lack of imagination and a bland composition. As the primary focal point of the cake, the candles should appear off centre at one of the line intersections, but don’t forget to carefully crop your cake for maximum compositional effect. My kids were not impressed. Their cake was wonky.]

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Anyway, in order to study how best to crop my photographs, I’ve been studying everyone else’s (i.e. yours), and asking Rich to explain why the photographs in question have been cropped in that way. It seems to me that cropping is of critical importance because it controls what the viewer sees. Cropping shifts the focal point of the photograph and thus changes the whole mood and subject of an image in order to convey to the viewer the message you are trying to achieve.

Now I thought good composition was simply a matter of cropping the subject to fill the frame, plus cropping out obvious distractions, and that was pretty much it. But alas it’s not as simple as that. Cropping is an art-form in itself, as important as the compositional rules you follow when you are actually taking the shot. Get the wrong crop, and the photograph is ruined, the message is lost, and what could have been an outstanding piece of art becomes something I look at and think “what exactly is the point?” I guess I simply don’t understand why some of you learned photographers out there decided to crop your photographs that particular way. Although it is perfectly possible (in fact it’s highly likely) that some of the more “arty” of all your cropping techniques which I’ve been moaning about recently are, in fact, correctly cropped and I’m just so darn stupid that I’ve missed the entire message of the photograph.

As to the eternal question “why crop that way?” there appears to be major online debates as to whether you should follow the Rules of Cropping, and indeed, whether or not those very rules exist to start with. As with all aspects of photography, there are times to follow the rules, and times to break them. I just wish I knew what the bloody things were in the first place. I’ve got to learn to follow them first, before I can break them. When is it O.K. to amputate a leg, and why is it acceptable (even preferable sometimes) to chop the top of a model’s head off? Shouldn’t the viewer be able to see the whole head?

So it appears that it’s all subjective (quelle surprise!) You can crop any way you want to make the composition look its best, but what you classify as your “best” is not necessarily what I would have chosen. To put it in terms that a writer like me will understand, cropping is like writing a sentence that's too long. Do you want to edit out a few words without changing the meaning of the sentence? Or do you want to use the very editing process to change the original meaning because removal of certain words results in a completely different story?

Anyway, I’ve now become so lost in my own composition that I’ve become mightily confused by the whole thing, and I’m now getting very cranky. Rich is getting so fed up with me analysing his photographs and suddenly appearing over his shoulder when he’s post-processing pictures, that he now hides when he’s finishing off his work, and last week a model told me that he’d deleted some pictures on camera as “Lin will have a go at me if I’ve chopped part of your arm off.” Oh dear. Clearly I am a Cropping Monster, and my enthusiasm is bordering on scary.

So if anyone else wants to volunteer as guinea pigs (not gerbils) for me to…er...pump them for their secret cropping techniques…all willing victims/advice would be greatly appreciated (by Rich as well as me.)

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To crop or not to crop? That is the question.

Images are of HoneyB. Rich was kind and patient enough to explain the reasons he cropped them this way, largely because I refused to give him any chocolate cake unless he complied. The new Photographic Learning Tool: Photography by Blackmail.

What Price Your Soul?

How do you decide what price to sell your prints for?

Well, generally you look around at the prices charged by your peers, and you pick a figure not too dissimilar from theirs. If you decide on an aggressive pricing policy, you may decide to charge less than your competitors, so that potential collectors are more tempted to choose yours over theirs. Or you may decide to sell your prints incredibly cheap, on the Ebay-style philosophy that you can bump up the shipping costs and make your profit margin that way. Or…as I have been taught, you always, always price your product over and above your main competitors. A higher price tag means that your art is automatically worth more because it has that aura of upper-market exclusivity. If you make it expensive and glossy, and pimp it as such, then people will want it more because it’s perceived as a luxury item. If you can get someone to (positively) review your piece of art, even better, because that adds even more exclusivity to the piece.

Sounds easy doesn’t it? In fact, you all know this basic stuff already. End of post. Or maybe not, because artists are humans, not autonomous pimping machines. The problem comes when you bring personal feelings into the whole monetary marketing process.

For example, how do you choose which photographs to sell? Collectors generally only buy pieces that they love, so how do you decide which ones are the right ones? After all, you can guarantee that the images your potential client loves will be different from your choice. There are many of Rich’s photographs that I adore, and he won’t even finish because he sees flaws that I don’t. These gorgeous photographs will never see the light of day, and yet I’m sure they’d sell if he would only trust my instincts. But he’s a man of principle, and he won’t finish (let alone sell) anything that doesn’t speak to him, or that he considers less than perfect in his eyes. He is limited by his perfectionism, by his emotions for his art, and like many photographers, he has absolutely no clue as to what price to put on his work.

You make a photograph because you have seen something that is beyond price, a glimpse of something beautiful, true and perfect which can’t be put into words. So it becomes tremendously difficult put a real value on such a glimpse of the infinite, because how do you price truth? You are blinded by your subjective feelings for your art, and yet you nevertheless have to assign a cash value to it. How do you put your personal feelings aside and view your work commercially, objectively and dispassionately?

In my own personal opinion, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of you being able to view your own work objectively, so don’t even try. You could ask the advice of a trusted and experienced photographic friend with commercial experience, who will help you choose the optimum images which are more likely to be commercially viable. However if you don’t have such a person close at hand, you’ll simply have to choose those images you love, and from that shortlist, guess which ones that will sell. Bearing in mind that a photographic artist puts a small piece of his soul into each and every image, you then have to literally put a price on your soul.

For Sale on Ebay: One Selenium Toned Soul on a 16"x20" Silver Gelatin Print, Printed by Artist, a bargain at $100 plus shipping.

Being both an artist and a businessman sucks, huh?!

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HoneyB from this week's shoot. This shot has been described as "a bit too out-there" so I'm guessing it's unlikely to qualify as suitable for print sale status. But Rich loves it, so what the heck, I'm posting it anyway.