Photographing A Thought

Whilst on my extended bloggie break, I found myself preoccupied with a question: Is it possible to photograph a thought?

I researched the matter in depth but came up with precious few answers. Thought-Photography is nigh-impossible, although many have tried. In 1933 a physicist called Nikola Tesla announced “a tremendous new power which was about to be unleashed.” He declared that he would soon be able to photograph thought, which he believed would bring about a total social revolution. He was convinced that “a definite image formed in thought, must by reflex action, produce a corresponding image on the retina,” which he believed he could read by use of an artificial retina which would receive and record the image of the object seen, and then photograph it. Needless to say, his experiment was a spectacular failure and Tesla died several years later, his ambitions unfulfilled.

By happenstance (or our weird sisterly psychic connection), a month or so after I read about Dr Tesla, our very own Dr L asked her bloggie readers to interpret her expression in a gorgeous portrait photograph of her by Andre Roussel. Because art (and portraiture in particular) is forever subjective, most of the commenters were unable to interpret her thought correctly (in fact, she was impatiently thinking about her overdue lunch.)

Unbearable Lightness by Andre Roussel, Montreal

Having discussed Thought-Photography with Rich at some length, he reckons that the problem is that in order to tell what someone is thinking, you have to first interpret their expression. This is not a straightforward process because people’s expressions are ambiguous. Study after study shows that a person’s perception of an expression is based upon what the viewer has seen moments BEFOREHAND. There are only a certain number of human expressions and as humans have evolved, expressions have always been interpreted in the context of the actions that precede it. They don’t in themselves have an intrinsic meaning when abstracted from events. So expressions don’t necessarily convey a thought, they just express emotion.

To understand a thought, it must be preceded by an event. A filmmaker has an advantage here because he can create a series of events which may be very subtle but which allow the viewer to correctly gauge an expression and thus the thought behind it. On the other hand, artists and photographers have to resort to props, or what Rich calls “tricks”, to transmit the context of the model’s expression and thus convey the thought to the viewer. In order to be successful, these tricks have to be very obvious. Subtlety doesn’t work.

In the case of a pure art nude portrait photograph, where there are rarely any props, I would therefore argue that it is nigh impossible to photograph a single thought and accurately convey it to viewers. As Dr L’s excellent photograph demonstrates, expressions are misleading (even basic ones like hunger) and viewers will naturally project their own feelings, interpretations and biases into a single picture. The model is thinking what we subconsciously want her to think, but we don’t really know the truth behind “the look.”

Perhaps this is the very reason why portraits remain so alluring, because they have that element of mystery. It’s the classic Mona Lisa question – what was she thinking? (Iksodas does this style very well.) The problem is that with art nude portraiture, we will never really know, and I must admit that this conundrum frustrates me. I WANT to know! Which is precisely the point of the photograph, I guess. The element of mystery is the hook which reels the viewer in.

I have no profound insights into Thought Photography to offer you, other than I wish I knew a sure-fire method of accurately capturing thought in a single frame. Perhaps this is beyond the capability of the camera as a tool. Maybe the apparatus is too limited, or perhaps the whole portraiture process is too easily influenced by viewer subjectivity to ever reliably convey real thought.

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Ivory Flame by Rich

One last (rather peculiar) nugget that I want to leave you with today is the story of the only proven occurrence of Thought Photography.

In 1973, Lawrence Fried, the then President of the American Society of Media Photographers, photographed Uri Geller in a controlled experiment which aimed to prove that Thought Photography was possible (although not in the same way that I am referring to above.)

In the presence of two assistants and a New York Reporter who acted as witnesses, Fried put a lens cap over his lens and covered it with double layered duct-tape to make it entirely light-tight. Geller then held the camera in front of his face with the lens facing him and then repeatedly pressed the shutter. The resulting film was then immediately developed (still in the presence of witnesses.) The resulting photographs were slightly out of focus but the images clearly showed Geller himself, taken at the exact spot where the photograph had been conducted.

So…the moral of the story is that Thought Photography IS possible. The model just needs to be psychic. Or a genius. Or crazy. Or all three.

Feel free to try this experiment at home with your highly psychic models. Do let me know how you get on, won’t you?

Evaluating Your Work

Last post for a wee while, I'm afraid. Real-life is getting in the way of bloggie-life and the day-job looks like it will suck up most of my time for the forseeable future. So be good, all of you and in the meantime I'll leave you with these thoughts...

It would be easier to produce really good photographs if we could see what we are doing. But we can’t see them, not objectively anyway. The problem is that we can look at our photographs on the screen every day without ever managing to see them clearly. IMO, the main problem is that humans have evolved in such a way that they primarily notice novelty. Our danger or pleasure mechanisms are only stimulated if something stands out from the background dross – if we notice something different. If you look at the same thing over and over again (whether it be your own work, or the plethora of b+w fine art nudes available online today) then if your brain is seeing the same old stuff day-in-day-out, you won’t be able to appreciate how your own work is changing. You won’t recognise or appreciate the detail or nuances in a particular photograph, and you certainly won’t be able to evaluate your body of work as a whole and assess how it is coming along.

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The trouble with being human is that the familiar rapidly becomes the background, which is why we love to buy new things of course. We buy a fancy new camera and we are excited by the fact that it is different, sharper, bigger, more powerful, cooler. We imagine that the quality of our photography will be transformed forever by this splendid new machine. And certainly the next few shoots will have an added lift. Our photos will look better to us and the quality of prints will have improved, as will the photos we look at on screen too, although our computer monitors have such low resolution that we won’t in fact, see any difference, despite the fact that we think we do. Yes indeed, as a result of this shiny new “thing” our art will seem more profound, we will feel that we are really getting somewhere and that our photography has leapt “to the next level.” But slowly and inexorably we stop noticing it. And then we long for another new "thing" to improve our work.

What we are, in fact, longing for is not a shiny new camera. What we are searching for is to be able to SEE something new and different in our body of work. We have a relentless appetite for “different” because we are wired that way, but instead of maxing out our credit cards on gadgets that we can’t afford and won’t make much difference anyway, rather we need to see our photographs differently. We need to learn how to step back and analyse our body of work as a whole, to evaluate the design, to see the Big Picture.

How do we do this? Well, I guess everyone has their own ideas. One trick that has been suggested is to go back to basics and analyse your images as if they were taken by a student and you had to teach him how to improve his technique and advise on his creative vision. Brooks Jensen has also suggested doing a small project based on a particular theme. There’s nothing like concentrating on a new and highly specific project (perhaps for the purpose of producing a series or a self-published book) to cause you to see your work in a more objective light and to really stimulate those creative juices.

Many photographers suggest that objectivity on one’s own work can be achieved by making high quality prints. No, looking at your images on screen is not sufficient. Rich has found that printing say, thirty of his best photographs and evaluating them for the purpose of an exhibition is a real eye-opener. Similarly trying to select his nine very best photographs and arranging them for an examination by the Royal Photographic Society was both a humbling and enlightening experience. He saw strengths and flaws that he hadn’t seen before. The process of imagining how an examiner would see his work really brought home which parts of his work were weak and which he needed to develop further, and as a result of this process he knew which direction his work should go in the future.

Many folks reading this may wonder why a photographer would wish to go to such trouble to see things they’d rather not see. But creating opportunities to see your own work freshly doesn’t just show up problems. It also takes you away from the relentless preoccupation with wanting “more” and suddenly returns you to the beauty of your own photography.

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Images are of Ivory Flame

How Low Can You Go?

I’ve been reading some rather pretentious literary web sites which spend a great deal of time pontificating about “high art.” The terms "high art" and "low art" have always struck me as pretty meaningless. IMO, trying to classify art as “highbrow” or “lowbrow” seems an entitely subjective process and ultimately rather pointless in this modern day and age. We've evolved beyond such nonsense, surely?

The notion of brow levels came about in the early 1900’s when free public schools first started. The sudden growth of education and the spread of literature resulted in the creation of the first national newspapers, which caused great outrage amongst both artists and intellectuals who argued that all these popular rags did was to reduce literature to the lowest common denominator. Baudelaire even referred to newspapers as “satanic.” The arguments continued to rage until eventually English culture divided into two: highbrow and lowbrow. Each individual fell into one of the two classes, depending on his personal taste and choices in books, art and hobbies. If you liked popular “mass” culture, this meant that you were lowbrow. The chasm continued to widen until journalism and popular culture became poles apart from “high art” and literature, never again to merge.

Nowadays most of us only know the differences between high art and low art by the reputation of the medium. Broadly speaking sculpture, painting, music, poetry, cinema and classic English literature all fall into the “high art” category, whereas tattoo art, children’s stories, comic strips, video game design and so forth would all classify as “low art.” Some modern art critics argue that with the growth of technology and the modern media, the distinction between high art and low art have now become permanently blurred. Some computer games, for example, can now be so sophisticated that they contain a detailed plot and character development, just like a good novel. At what point does the medium cease to matter, and when exactly does lowbrow evolve into highbrow?

IMO, nowhere do these abstract lines between high and low blur more than with the nude photographic medium, largely because it is very difficult to objectively catergorize images of naked women.

High art is seen to be spiritually moving, sophisticated and philosophically challenging, so when does a photograph meet this specification? Low art is a derogatory term which can be classified as popular culture which may be visually entertaining, but which is nevertheless intellectually sterile, nothing more than commercial pap to feed the masses. So what kind of nude photograph would satisfy this definition? Which type of nude image is high culture and which is popular culture? Is it really as simple as:

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High Art? (B+W fine art nude, Ivory Flame)

vs.

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Low Art? (Colour erotica, HoneyB)

Which image is high art, if any? Which of the two is deeper, more exciting, more sophisticated and philosophically challenging? The medium is the same, so what’s the difference?

I would suggest that the difference isn’t merely to do with lighting and composition. IMO it largely depends on intent. What type of emotional reaction did the photographer want to generate? What was his creative vision? What market was the photograph aimed at? Or does it purely come down to personal taste? So if we use these criteria then the first image is more tasteful, non-sexual and more likely to stimulate the intellect and is therefore more towards the "high art" category, whereas the second largely stimulates the male groin, and would be lower - very low, in fact, which is a shame because I actually prefer the second above the first, although I can't for the life of me figure out why? Maybe I'm just a lowbrow kinda girl?

Frankly all this categorization seems like blatent snobbery to me. IMO, classifying a particular type of nude photograph as “high” or “low” is pure pompous elitism. Isn't black and white “fine art” photography nothing more than lowbrow with different packaging, nekkid chix re-invented and re-wrapped for the titillation of the very same supposed highbrow intellectuals and art critics who would otherwise condemn all nude photography as non-artistic?

Maybe we haven’t really grown that much in a hundred years after all.

The Outsiders

A few weeks back I was mentioning to a very old friend that I wrote a photographic art blog. All well and good until I mentioned that it featured (tasteful) nudes. Note: I did stress the tasteful bit. This friend refused to ever speak to me again. I have lost several other close friends over the course of the last three years for the same reason. Yes, they all looked at the blog, yes they read it, and no matter how artistically I dressed it up, that was IT. I had crossed the line, and there was no going back. From that point onwards, Rich and I were, and now always will be, pornographers.

*Sigh*

Here we go again.

I am sure most of you have been through this many times before. It’s no big deal, right? Who cares what other people think? WE know it’s art. Sod everyone else! We have our little corner of the photographic world, we all support each other. We outcasts know the truth, even if no-one else is intelligent enough to recognise it. Nude photography is Art with a capital ‘A.’ it’s not our fault if the general public are too blind and repressed to realise that. Just ignore them. These so-called “friends” were never real friends to start with, otherwise they would accept us for who we are.

Yeah right.

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Why do we do it? Why do we buck the trend and continue to rebel in the face of so much disapproval? Is being “out there on the edge” all it’s cracked up to be?

After nearly three years immersed in the photographic world, we are now so used to seeing nude photographs that they have become natural to us. Unremarkable. I am now so completely unfazed if the subject of a photograph is naked that I actually expect it. Nude images long ago lost their capacity to shock me, yes even really graphic ones.

Only a couple of years ago, seeing a photograph of a woman tied up would evoke a powerful emotional response in me. (I never was very good with coping with bondage.) These days, because of the circles in which I mix, such images have become curiously tame. I now look beyond the nakedness. I look for the photographer’s message, the emotional content, the lighting, the composition. I analyse, I dissect. I don’t see a nude photograph the way my non-photographic friends do. What I receive to be a normal artistic subject (i.e. the image of an unclothed female) the squeamish general public see as radical, rebellious, shocking, exhibitionist, pornographic, repulsive, perverted.

To be honest, when people judge Rich’s photography this way, it still really upsets me. His work is beautiful (or at least that's his intention.) Why can’t outsiders see that? Why are we perverts because we photograph people with no clothes on? Why are nude photographers automatically shocking, smutty and unclean? And what does it say about Rich and I that we now consider all types of nude photography – art nude, glamour, bondage, fetishism and so forth - as normal? We view the different nude photographic genres as we would a particularly attractive shade of wallpaper: Different, interesting, decorative, pleasing to the eye, but no longer shocking or offensive. No, never that.

We do not consider ourselves to be pornographers. We are not obsessed with sex or porn. We are ordinary people. So who are the real Outsiders here? Us (for being rebels?) or the “normal people” who consider our photographs to be aberrations, perversions, no more than pornographic smut to be deleted if the images are accidentally discovered whilst browsing online?

Are we really that Dirty?

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Images are of Ivory Flame

Photography: An Aggressive Sport

A few months ago Rich shot a model (not the one featured below) who seemed unusually apprehensive. He did everything he could to put her at ease, and when she finally relaxed and started to talk it turned out that she was indeed nervous about shooting, not because she was inexperienced or didn’t want to pose nude, but because she was completely fed up with photographers pushing her to reveal her personality in a shoot. Past photographers weren’t just interested in what she wanted to show them, they were interested in what she didn’t. They wanted to capture “the real her.” She felt that this was outside the scope of the shoot, off limits, PRIVATE. Experiences with past photographers had resulted in such psychological pressure to expose herself that she was disillusioned with them and could no longer relax in front of the camera.

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As a model I will admit to being able to identify with this. Whereas most photographers assume that their subjects will value the photographic skill and insight into their personality, this is not always the case. Sontag once observed that photographing a person can be seen as an act of violation. “By seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have, it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.” And what if that photographic subject didn’t want to be photographed in that way? Consider a paparazzi photographer who spends his life trying to get the picture of the latest celeb. His livelihood depends on him catching a “killer shot” of the celeb in question. The more exposed and off-guard the shot of the subject, the more money he gets. He is actively stalking his prey in the same way that hunters hunt wild animals with their gun.

Think I’m exaggerating? Think that photography is forever a peaceful profession? Think again. You only have to look at the language used in photography to realise that photography is primarily the domain of men, and is consequently aggressive in nature. We talk about “loading” and “aiming” a camera, “shooting” a film (are we talking about cameras or guns here? See the parallel?) We “take” a photograph, “capture” a moment. Again, all hunting terms, all with the emphasis on taking rather than giving.

It has been suggested that photographing a subject unawares is akin to a fundamental violation, in the most violent sense possible. If you photograph someone in a certain way without their permission and when they are emotionally exposing their psyche, then you are capturing a moment where they are at their most vulnerable. This is not a gentle act. Although the photographer may only be seeking an exceptional shot of a person, unless that model has explicitly told you that she is happy for you to find that in her, then it is by default an act of unintentional aggression.

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To some photographers, such intrusions are acceptable providing they yield a strong image. Perhaps you photograph a model when she is undressing for a shoot (something which many models really hate, incidentally) or perhaps you photograph her in an outtake when she is feeling sad or pulling a goofy face. It might be an outstanding shot, but do you have the right to use that image? No, don’t quote model releases to me here. I’m not talking about legal issues, I’m talking about ethics. At what point does capturing such an unexpected moment, an unguarded expression, a moment where you discover “the real her” become an overstepping of the boundaries? When does it become a violation of privacy?

In every shoot there is an unspoken contract between photographer and subject. Whether or not you violate that contract in the name of pursuing truth or insight is a subjective judgement and depends on the personal integrity of the individual photographer. If you do not consider it your responsibility to preserve the model’s psychological privacy, if you are only concerned with the final image regardless as to whether or not the subject is emotionally comfortable with you penetrating her psyche in that way, then at what point does the selfish pursuit of a strong shot become offensive? At what point is it a violation of the power that she entrusted to you?

Ask yourself if your work is primarily about you, the photographer, and your relentless hunt for “the one shot” that defines a person? If your photography becomes no more than satisfying your quest for “truth” (whatever that is), or no more than proving to yourself what an outstandingly insightful photographer you are, then I put it to you that you are arguably no better that that paparazzi photographing the celeb, or the hunter with the gun stalking his prey.

My own conclusion is that the ethical photographer will maintain a friendliness, openness and flexibility with the subject. He will not stalk or pursue her, nor will he abuse his power. Rather, he will openly discuss what he is looking for at the start of the shoot, and obtain her approval and consent. He will always respect her boundaries, both physical and psychological. Such a friendly relationship goes a long way towards offsetting the aggressive nature of photography.

Unfortunately this giving rather than taking isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Sometimes your intentions might be entirely honourable and you think that your subject is perfectly happy with the way you work, but you may nevertheless violate invisible psychological boundaries because your subject is too trusting, too naïve, too polite or even because she simply misunderstands what you are looking for. So you might believe that you’re not being aggressive, you might think that your model is perfectly happy with the way you shoot and values your unique skill and insight into “the real her,” but are you absolutely sure?

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Images are of Ivory Flame

Swathed in Blue

“Change has come to America.”

Barack Obama, President-Elect of the United States

I imagine ya’ll be too busy partying right now to read this, but I just wanted to congratulate all those of you who have been fighting so passionately for change. You did it! You have (literally) re-written the map.

If you want to see a fascinating blow-by-blow account of history being made, Stephen’s blog from last night makes for gripping reading.

Congrats to all, and to Obama too. The poor bloke has certainly inherited a mess. As Time magazine observed so accurately: “America is drowning in debt. Getting square again will be painful.”

Change is long overdue. As to whether Obama can rescue America from its watery depths, only time will tell.

In the meantime, here in the U.K. we have a little while to go yet before our own “new dawn.” Personally, I can’t wait for the day when we too re-write our own map. Blue ink, of course :-)

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Ivory flame, dancing for joy

The Secret

This one’s for Chris.

You all know Monsieur St. James of course. The author of the leading blog Univers d’Artistes, he is at the centre of our nude photographic community and inspires us on a daily basis with his tireless dedication to showing us the very best that the nude photographic world has to offer. By sharing with us fantastic interviews, articles and most importantly the work of different photographic artists, Chris has created something unique and wonderful. But the real reason I’m mentioning him here is because he is probably one of the wisest men you’ll ever come across. Why? Because he has realised something which not many folks figure out: just how effective art can be as a healing tool.

A recent study at the Università degli Studi di Bari in Italy showed that when a group of people were asked to contemplate a series of paintings, their pain was found to be a third less intense when they were looking at beautiful artistic imagery. This has actually been known in the UK for some time. In another study by Dr Lee Elliot Major, research director at the Sutton Trust, it was demonstrated that paintings in hospitals really do help patients, both in terms of longevity and recovery times. I guess we are lucky here in the UK that our National Health Service thought that this research was important enough to actually do something about it as part of its national healthcare policy.



When I visited St Bart’s Hospital in London earlier this year, I noticed William Hogarth’s painting Pool of Bethesda (above) still hanging on the grand staircase, and even my local hospital (a shining beacon in free local healthcare) has a whole section of the hospital dedicated to the best and the brightest in the art world. As well as having its own art gallery, the entire corridor (which runs the entire length of the hospital and is nearly half a mile end to end) is covered in beautiful paintings donated by both talented patients and well known artists. Like many others, I have spent hours there drinking in the fantastic art (O.K. I admit the coffee there is pretty good too!)

Such exhibitions never fail to lift patients, to inspire them, to give them hope. The opportunity to enjoy something creative offers not only a distraction from physical discomforts and endless medical procedures, but it also gives focus and the invitation to participate in something more fundamental, more important than these crappy bodies we are trapped in. Through studying art, patients get to engage in something outside themselves, something more spiritual, and through this participation, so begins the healing process. The body may remain broken and in pain, but the mind, the soul, is growing, expanding in the presence of beauty, reaching for the eternal.

When my body is giving me hell, when I’m feeling pretty darn awful, what do I do? I go look at the finest that the photographic art world has to offer, and that would of course be the work of all you photographers reading this. If I appear to be getting overly sentimental, then do excuse me. Maybe the healing power of art is something you have to experience on a personal level before you realise its potential. But Chris and I, and thousands more like us, we know The Secret:

Art heals the spirit, which in turn heals the body.

And that makes you, the photographers and artists out there reading this, more valuable to us than you could ever know.

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Visions in cruciferous art

Where hunger + art = beauty+ form.

Lin is on a diet. Lin is starving. Lin is obsessing about sexy nekkid veggies again. Yeah, I know….you’re all frantically clicking the X button and vowing to come back in a few days time, but bear with me for a moment. (It gets hungrier, I promise.)

Whilst drooling over tonight’s dinner, it occurred to me that veggie porn is in fact an instrument for learning more about photography as well as about new and interesting ways to stuff your gob. Natural unprocessed food is a thing of beauty. Yeah I know you might experience your deepest artistic creative vision whilst gazing on the carbonated rectangle that comprises your instant ready-meal lasagne, but I’m talking about something much more profound that that. I’m talking about how gazing at your pert, firm, ripe, luscious veggies really teaches you to see.

Photography is often regarded as an instrument for teaching things, a way of discovering something new. A good photograph shows you something you hadn’t considered before, it reveals a new truth that you didn’t previously know.

Nature photographs illustrate my point perfectly. Consider a totally groovy photograph like the following piece by Weston (who else?) Doesn’t it just blow your mind? This might be lost on many of you, but personally this gives me a high nearly as good as the warm and fuzzy glowing feeling I get after boozing on one of bt’s mojito recipes.



At first I mistook it for an elegantly draped piece of cloth. I mean – wow! That looks like a fashion shot which could easily grace the pages of Vogue. Initially when you look at it, you don’t realise what the subject really is because the photograph is deliberately ambiguous, at least when seen from a distance. When you study it a bit more closely and you realise it’s a cabbage, it is that element of surprise is what makes you go, “Cool!”

This element of trickery, or teaching your viewer to see something new, is what draws us in to the photograph, and makes us linger over its beauty. It’s human nature to try and figure out what something means, and it is precisely this element of surprise which makes this photograph such compulsive viewing. Weston wasn’t like the rest of us, he could really see the hidden form in nature, and it was this ability to capture on camera the very different way he perceived the world, which made him a Master of Photography.

Of course Rich has a smidgen of a way to go before he reaches Weston’s standard, but he hasn’t let that deter him. Veggie art still has a lot to teach the amateur photographer. We all have to start somewhere after all. I mean, who hasn’t gone to their fridge in a moment of photographic desperation and picked out a pepper and tried to photograph it? C’mon…admit it, we’ve all done it. It’s part of the photographic learning process you know. Today a pepper, tomorrow a nude. Everything is a fine art photograph if you know how to look at it properly.

Actually I jealously guard my peppers (tonight’s ratatouille you know) but I’m slightly more footloose and fancy-free with my brassicas, so here’s a much less-talented and predictable example of veggie porn:

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A Fluffy Cauli

It is of course a cauliflower (steam florets lightly for 20 mins and then mash - dee-lish!) Now is this not one of the most beautiful vegetables you’ve ever seen? Mother nature is both superlative artist and perfect mathematician. Maths, art and food are all expressions of beauty, inexorably intertwined. Just think what Weston would have done with my cauliflower fractals. Makes me slightly fuzzy even thinking about it.

So what is the message in this rambling nonsense?

Well, I say to thee, go forth and photograph yummy veggies or nude women, either will do. They both represent shining examples of the exquisite form and beauty of mother nature’s finest creations. Look at your subject. Squeeze her sweet juicy flesh, feel the way the light caresses her sensual curves. Really look beyond what an ordinary person would see and discover just how sensual this object is. Is she not the most exotic, erotic, aesthetically perfect thing you’ve ever seen? Now try to use your most excellent photographic skills to capture what you’ve just seen on camera, whilst still maintaining that element of surprise. Your objective is to try to show reality from a different perspective, to captivate your viewer and make him really see as you do.

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Mmm…all these brassicas are making me starving. Time to cook my beloved object of beauty for dinner (the vegetable I mean, not the nude.) It’s a crying shame but it’s gotta be done. Can’t let art get in the way of stuffing my stomach you know.

Food + art = fully satiated nude.

Yum.

Justify My Art

Congratulations if you manage to make it to the end of this marathon epic and stay awake. Verbal diarrhoea or meaningful discussion about photographic art? You decide.

One of the most common accusations in the photographic world is that fine art nude photographers do not produce worthwhile and evolving photography. Many opponents argue that fine art nudes have no place in modern photography, that fine art is cheapened by the inclusion of a naked woman, that it is not “serious photography.”

It is a generally accepted concept in fine art photography (so Brooks Jensen et al. say anyway) that in order to constitute a good photograph, an image should be powerful. It should stimulate some sort of emotional response in the viewer, enlighten him or teach him a new truth. In short the photograph should mean something.

However, the objective of a fine art nude photograph is not necessarily to arouse an erotic reaction in the viewer. The purpose is to idealise and create an unattainable vision of beauty, a goddess, a vision of perfection, captured for one moment in time. An emotional response is not guaranteed. Thus it is argued by fine-art purists that mere admiration and objectification of beauty is insufficient to qualify a photograph as fine art. The purists maintain that fine art nudes are meaningless because they don’t enlighten the viewer nor do they produce a deep emotional response. A b+w nekkid chick isn’t exactly as psychologically profound as Pepper No 30 or Moonlight over Hernandez, now is it?

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Further, it is argued that there are simply too many fine art nude photographers nowadays. If you Google “Fine Art Nudes” there are tens of thousands of hits. Because of the growth of the internet and cheap digital cameras, b+w nudes are considered too overdone, too predictable. There are now so many images out there in cyberspace that they all look the same, and the topic has become boring, trivial and irrelevant. The genre is exhausted.

Lastly, we should consider the motivations of fine art nude photographers. Do nude photographers actually believe in art, or is it just an excuse to be in the same room as a naked woman? Nowadays every middle-aged bloke wants to be a fine art photographer. It allows him to get up close and personal with a naked chick and justify it as Art to his wife. Whether or not this means a photographer is a GWC or a fine art photographer is a moot point. Some guys don’t actually want to have sex with a woman, they just want to be in the same room and worship the perfect unattainable female from a distance. They want to create that image of Venus in every model they shoot, to bring out the inner Goddess in each woman. Does this make the photographer a GWC or an artist? Is the classification of whether or not a photographer qualifies as a proper fine art photographer simply a matter of whether he is technically any good at lighting and composition? Can the lowly GWC be a fine-art photographer if he is skilled enough, and do his motivations actually matter?

Moreover, if a photographer concentrates exclusively on shooting the female nude, doesn’t this result in variations on the same theme over and over again? Sure the lighting and model may vary, but the message is the same throughout. Every model is the same goddess, just with different skin. Is the photographer who repeats himself over and over again actually achieving anything? If he is conveying an emotional message that women are divine and unattainable, then O.K. what happens once he has done that? Now what? Sure the photographer has to develop his lighting and technique, and he becomes a better photographer, but that is a technical exercise. How does the message of his photography evolve? How can he continue doing the same thing for years and years without going completely nuts?

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Now before you all go and throw your Hasselblads into the nearest swamp, I want to tell you a story told to Rich by a well respected nude photographer whom he met recently.

The photographer concerned used to be in the armed forces when he was younger. Because he had some photographic training, he was allocated the terrible task of photographing and cataloguing the dead bodies for identification. Now personally I can’t imagine a worse assignment for a photographer. The level of horror and carnage that he was exposed to must have been unimaginable. The photographer didn’t go into the gory details, but clearly the experience had scarred him emotionally for life. Anyway, when the photographer returned home from his assignment, he resigned his commission and although he remained a photographer, he vowed to only ever photograph what was beautiful and good in the world. For the rest of his life. And what could possibly represent beauty, goodness and purity more than a naked woman?

As Ansel Adams said, “it is just as important to bring people the evidence of beauty of the world of nature and of man as it is to give them a document of ugliness, squalor, and despair.”

Ultimately nudes are like a beautiful landscape, where the subject is flesh rather than trees or a rock. Just as you can never grow tired of shooting different breathtaking landscapes, the beauty and infinite variety of the nude form can never become overdone or monotonous. It is the goal of the photographer to discover that unique individual spark within each woman, and if he succeeds, if only for a second, then that single moment captured by the camera is surely the essence of what photography is all about.

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I thought we'd have a Fine-Ass theme this time (as opposed to Fine-Art...oh never mind...)

How Not To Write An Artist’s Statement

For the first time, Rich has been asked for an artist statement from a site that wants to feature his work. Now as you know, Rich is not known for his flowery prose, and he’s certainly not adept at the art of bullshit. He’s interested in telling it like he sees it, from the heart, but after browsing around a great many bio’s and artists’ statements, it appears that Rich’s brief and honest “I shoot nekkid chix 'cos I love boobies” won’t exactly cut it in the serious art world.

He needs something a bit more profound, more descriptive, more eloquent, more waffly, in short he needs to prove that he is a fathomless, mega-deep, serious photographer who’s not remotely interested in ogling naked women, but instead is entirely focused on more noble and ethereal concerns.

Hmm. Where to begin.

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So we started by looking around everyone else’s. Lord almighty, that was an eye-opener. Does anyone ever read artists’ statements anyway? Well, we did, hundreds of them, and I can tell you that it was a hilarious experience. Overall, the word PRETENTIOUS springs to mind. No humour, no honesty, no straight-forward “I photograph because I love it. The End.” Instead almost everyone broke the first and most important rule of writing an artist’s statement: Write your statement in language that anyone can understand.

A few typical examples we came across:

“I seek to expose what is going on deep within the psyche of my subjects, and I use photography as an artistic medium to interact with and transform our perceptions of ourselves and our visual settings.”

“I like to pursue an idea to a conclusion that seems to have an inevitability about it, as though the [photograph] has always existed in an ethereal sense”

“Some artists say their photographs allow them to get closer to nature; mine allow me to get closer to my dreams”

“My primary concern is with the interaction of individuals with each other and with the rest of the cosmos, the interface of self with other.”

“If I can awaken in my subject an inner awareness of emotion or realisation of their true psyche, then I have succeeded in my quest for enlightenment”

Oh please. I mean...seriously...

No-one would believe this stuff in a million years. How can such garbage be taken seriously? O.K. Not all the statements were like that, but many of them were the stuff of fantasies, blatant bullshit riddled with arty-jargon. The strange thing is, that such flowery-arty-mumbo-jumbo appears to be mandatory. The more successful the artist or photographer, the more nonsensical and ethereal is the artist’s statement. Clearly, in order for Rich to prove he is not a GWC he should totally ignore the professional advice and instead spout psychological crap which bears no resemblance to reality, just as long as it sounds cool. Most importantly, it must always sound ARTY, otherwise how else can he possibly be taken seriously as Un Grand Artiste???

So let’s embrace our inner bullshitter and see what happens:

“I wish to breathe fresh air into the musty chateau of the art-nude genre with the quest for inner awakening of the psyche. The subtle nuances captured by my lens illuminate the richness and depth of the complex soul. My passion is to explore the waves of light and darkness as they caress the skin of the perfectly formed embodiment of Aphrodite. Each individual goddess is so beautiful that she commands attention and demands my intense exploration of her innermost depths.”

(Rough translation: Phwoar! Boobie Art Rocks!)

Whaddaya think folks?

Nope. IMO, not nearly deep ‘n’ arty enough. Back to the drawing board, I guess.

More alcohol, we definitely need more alcohol. Clearly all truly great artists’ statements should be written whilst completely out of one’s tree.

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IvoryFlame of course.

The Makeover

Welcome to the new look of Fluffytek.

I've spent the last week reworking the website, creating new graphics and layouts, sorting through the images and updating the galleries. Lots of work and lots of changes; it's a completely new site.

The gallery now has expanding images, just like the pages from the blog. For those of you who are curious, you can't do the expanding blog images thing without hosting the blog on your own website.

It was all finished off yesterday and all that remained were the changes to the blogger templates to make everything look coherent. So I spent yesterday afternoon editing the template in blogger and when it was finished, I saved the changes without publishing so that when I did this post all the updates would go through at once, and hay presto the new shiny Fluffytek site would be announced.

You can imagine how annoyed I was to get up this morning and find that blogger had published the changes anyway. Thus some of you had a preview of the new look but with all the links broken, and the page still embedded in a frame. So it looked ghastly and broken. Sorry about that.

So I took the whole site down!

And now it's back up.

You can navigate the site from the links at the top. You can keep up with what we are doing with twitter. We have one twitter account for Fluffytek and we will prefix Lin's twitters with L: and my twitters with R: so you know who is saying what.

So:
Do you like the new site?
Is it not awesomely good looking?
Is Twitter a good idea?
Do you want to hear our insane ramblings?

Please take a look around and let us know what you think.

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This is Ivory Flame launching herself as well as the new Fluffytek website.

Does A Photograph Have to Tell A Story?

Since time immemorial philosophers and artists have believed that art must express a degree of depth, that it must communicate some sort of wisdom. In the 1700’s the philosopher Sir Joshua Reynolds stated that in order to be great art, a painting must tell a major story. In order to fully appreciate that art, viewers had to decipher or “read” this story from the image and understand its meaning.

This ethos has continued to permeate modern photographic philosophy, particularly in the nude photographic genre. It is not enough that the camera captures reality – in order for a photograph to be deemed successful photographic art, there must be an element of a story, something “more” to draw the viewer in. As a random example, dip into any image in the magnificent Fetish Photo Anthology 5, and you’ll find a story. Each image has a different tale to tell, even the (supposedly simple) portraits.

It is worth pointing out that story interpretation is subjective. Each viewer will visualise and extrapolate the individual photographs differently, according to what he thinks he can see. What matters is that the viewer is drawn to analyse the image, to seek a message from within the photograph. That’s what makes the photograph powerful. Successful art has the ability to generate emotion. The photographer’s job is not necessarily to convey his original intention of the image to the viewer, but rather to stimulate the imagination of the viewer to feel some sort of intellectual or emotional reaction, depending on each person’s own individual interpretation.

For example, when looking at a nude female photograph, women will usually look for a different message than men. I tend to look for the overall message of the photograph first, examine the emotion that it generates in me. I’m not really looking for the erotic thrill of seeing a naked chick, I don’t look at details, I’m searching for the esoteric, the spiritual message within (assuming there is one.) A man might see that too of course, but you’ll appreciate that a man is more likely to experience an erotic reaction to a photograph of a nude, than a heterosexual woman would.



Rich thinks this is all codswallop. He says he doesn’t do stories. As you all know he favours fine-art figure studies, which he says, tell no story. He reckons that photographs don’t have to tell a story to be classified as artistic. It is enough to capture what is really there. A story is nice, but not always required. He says his own photographic motivations are to bring out the best in a woman, “to make her look the best she can possibly be.” Thus, he says, no story is present in a figure study, and nor is any “inner message” necessary for this genre to be classified as artistic.

I think he is wrong. IMO a figure study does tell a story, but it is a tale of light and shadow and mood, a story of an ordinary woman being elevated to something more ethereal. She looks perfect, unattainable, almost unearthly. The art nude photograph reflects not just the ordinary woman within, it combines the physical and the celestial, reality and fiction, through the technique of light, shadow, composition and posing. The ordinary woman becomes “something greater” than what she usually feels, she becomes just a little bit like a goddess. On looking at her finished images, a model will often say, “Wow! I never knew I could look like that. I’m really beautiful.” And THAT itself is the story. If the only depth and wisdom that art-nude photography achieves is to make a woman realise her inner beauty, then that’s enough story for me.

So, unlike Rich, I believe that successful photographs do tell a story, and that’s why we crave looking at them so much. Just as a child is addicted to listening to stories, we grownups also continue to resemble the children we once were. We grow older but we do not change. We always crave the next story, and the next. They are as essential to our survival as food. Whether these stories are via the written word, through illustrations or through photographs, it doesn’t matter, just as long as we are fed.

The photographer is therefore so much more than someone who merely captures and records reality. He is our master storyteller, the creator of magic, and the artist who has power over our imagination.

The Five Percent

People are sheep.

No this isn’t me being condescending and arrogant again. It’s fact.

A study by Professor Jens Krause of Leeds University Biological Sciences Department found that it takes a minority of just 5 percent of what he calls “informed individuals” to influence a crowd of 200 people. The remaining herd of 95 percent follow the 5 percent without even realising they are doing it.

If you think about it, this is entirely logical because after all, we are animals, and we are therefore genetically programmed to follow general animal herding behaviour. We just don’t realise we are being led. In truth most of us (95 percent to be exact) are happy to play follow-my-leader, regardless of whether or not the leader actually knows what he is doing.

Of course you’re all thinking of politics at this point, and you’d be correct of course. But this same principle applies to everything, including photography. Ed Verosky recently lamented photographers copying a certain photographic style originally devised by Jill Greenberg.

Is this a case of the herd instinct taking over? Is plagiarism (Oh God, I used the “P” word and I vowed I’d never do that again) not actually the fault of those that imitate certain styles or images, but simply a result of genetic programming? Is the animal photographer just following the herd because he can’t help it? Is it actually hardwired instinct for the majority of us to follow the photographic fashion of the time, whether that fashion be a lighting style, a pose, a “look,” an idea, or a combination of these factors?

The herd instinct is programmed into 95% of us. Only 5 percent of you out there are actually naturally born innovators, leaders, creators of unique photographic ideas/styles/images etc. So only 5 percent of you reading this actually find it natural to think outside the box, to create something photographically and artistically unique.

You’ve no idea how much I envy you. The rest of us, the remaining 95%, we are merely programmed to follow where you lead.

If you want to move from the 95 percent to the 5 percent, then you have to fight your herd instinct with very fibre of your being. It’s just so easy to march to the beat of everybody else’s drum. But you can’t. You want to be part of the 5 percent. We all do. So you have to learn to fight your genetics, re-program your artist’s brain to actually THINK differently, practice viewing and imagining things from a different perspective. To paraphrase Brooks Jensen, the next time the flock veers left, try wandering off right just for fun, and seeing where the journey takes you.

Yes it will be difficult, challenging and you might not be sure that the end result actually qualifies as artistic, but whoever said making a decent photograph was easy?

Looking but not seeing - The PhotoSig Wars

Yesterday, for a bit of fun, I decided to post one of my images of IvoryFlame to Photosig. I wanted to see how quickly it would get on the front page and see if the quality of the critiques had gone up.

The photo hit the front page within about an hour of being posted, which was most excellent.

The critiques were about the same “quality” as usual but they set me thinking about what the viewers were saying and why.

There were several responses in appreciation of how much they liked the image and inevitably there were a few that wanted to offer technical improvements to my technique. These were the ones that set me thinking.

There are Photosig members who base their critique on opening the image in Photoshop and playing with the levels to see where the white point is, if there are any blown highlights, if there is actually any absolute black, and of course the contrast levels. This is the basis of their critique. If you don’t have an absolute white then that’s not good, if you don’t have an absolute black, then that’s not good either. If the face is not illuminated, then that will be criticised. Shadows can't be the focal point of an image.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

That's like trying to listen to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony with a spectrum analyser. Hearing music is insufficient, you have to listen to really appreciate a piece. Looking at a photograph is pointless, you have to actually see it to appreciate it.

I'd also like to mention two words by way of education.

"Specular Highlight."

This is the highlight that is created when light bounces off a shiny object such as glass or chrome. What many people don’t realise is that at a low angle of incidence, human skin also produces specular reflection. This specular reflection cannot by its nature have any detail in it because it is a highlight. Underexposing a specular highlight still creates a specular highlight, but it’s just grey not white.

Anyhoo, its time to show you the picture. Hopefully this image creates a certain sense of mystery, and not the sort that is fixed by playing with Photoshop.

Enjoy.



Addendum:
After an argument with the admins of Photosig as to whether I should accept and value any and all crits (from poeple who have a port of crappy images or no images at all), it appears I am "arrogant" and "love my work." Phew, to think that I might actually hate my work!?! Now there's a thought!

Dose this mean I've made it as a photographer? After all, the majority the great photographers whom I admire have gone to war with Photosig and then left.

Hurrah, I must be a photographic artist at last!!!!!

Eostre Greetings

Apologies for being a little wacko this week. I suspect that 70 hour working weeks and radiation fallout don’t go well together. I’m not of this politically correct American art world. Different rules apply there, and sometimes I forget that when I'm tired. Plus the trouble with blogging is that, at some point, you discover that you’ve become lost in your own ass. Mr Wood has always maintained that if he wrote a blog it would consume him, and I’m beginning to realise the same problem.

Talking of pleasant posteriors, here’s another rather spiffing shot of the gorgeous IvoryFlame. This image sucks on my little laptop monitor and looks bloody fabulous on Rich’s groovy high resolution monitor (Synchmaster 244T.) This monitor resolution issue is really frustrating us both. You’ve no idea just how many kick-ass photographs we don’t show on-blog because most people can’t see the fine detail due to lower grade monitors like mine. The subtleties are just lost.

There’s different shades of black you know, and some are blacker than others. A valid statement about my moods this week, as well as about publishing photographs.

*sigh* If only I could show you the prints instead.



Incidentally, for those that don't know, Easter is primarily a pagan festival. Eostre was the ancient Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring and fertility. She was supposedly reincarnated in the form of a hare, since it was widely believed that when hunted, the mother hare would sacrifice herself so that her offspring could escape. So that's why you get cute little chocolate rabbits everywhere at Easter. Easter eggs symbolise fertility because, well duh, life hatches from them. So basically (Christians please look away now) Easter is about spring sex.

Wishing you all a great Eostre, with lots of fertility rituals:-)

(For those that want to debate theology and the actual date of the death of Jesus, please do feel free to email me.)

(R6) Creative Vision

In which the writer becomes the photographic blogosphere's Public Enemy No.1.

Franz Rosenzweig defined “creative vision” as “the artist’s plan, the basis for the individual artist’s construction of his individual work.” Nowadays, this term is more generally used to refer to when a photographer has a vision of his unique style in his head. He sees what he wants to shoot before he shoots it, and through the medium of photography, his creative vision is realised in the final image. Voila! True art is born!

Unfortunately this inspirational little phrase has now become so overused in the photographic community that I get very annoyed every time I hear it. Which is often. Very, very often.

“Creative vision” is a modern catch-phrase, a must have accessory. You’re not a real photographer unless you have one. You can justify just about any photograph as “true art” because it reflects the “creative vision” of the photographer. It doesn’t matter if the image in question is messy, chaotic, badly shot or just plain awful, in this modern politically correct art world it isn’t polite or cool to be critical of an image. All images can be defined as “art” because art must be subjective nowadays, and so you have to be nice, you have to see meaning or depth in an image, you have to look for the photographer’s “creative vision.” So what if you secretly don’t understand it? So what if you don’t feel anything for the image? If you don’t like it then you, the viewer, are a bad critic because clearly you don’t understand the artist’s true vision.

Oh please. Why the hell can’t we call a bad photograph, “a bad photograph?” Why should I be the one at fault because I don’t understand you? Isn’t it just remotely possible that your art is just not very good? Why does me being less artistically educated than you, mean that I am missing something about your work?

The truth be told, bad photographers are prevalent in the art world. We all know it. Their work may be trite, amateurish, a load of rubbish, but because the photographer is good at marketing himself, because he’s skilled in the art of bullshit, then he can convince just about anyone that his work is good. The charlatan artist can schmooze you into believing that his creative vision is so subtle, so mysterious, so esoteric that because you don’t understand his work, this actually means that you, the viewer, are the one who is at fault. Clearly you don’t recognise his creative vision as the work of genius that it really is.

What a load of bollocks. But people are taken in by it all the time. I know I used to be. Producing bad art and promoting it as genius is very seductive, but it’s actually fake, a lie, a betrayal of what creative vision actually should be.

I do believe that there is such a concept as “creative vision,” but it is a nebulous concept, not easily translated into words, and even harder to translate into a photograph. And not every photographer has one.

Real creative vision is ordered, disciplined, harmonious, unique to the individual artist, and its beauty is such that it can be translated by the artist into something that can be easily understood by the viewer. Creative vision is constantly evolving, never static, an ongoing quest for knowledge, to paraphrase Cézanne, “a model of steadfast learning and growth, the artist’s value lies not so much in what he can MAKE, but in his capacity to seek and continue to find.”

My personal opinion is that it takes an entire lifetime to discover your real creative vision, because it is all about figuring out your own unique message you are meant to express to the world through your work. And maybe, just maybe, by the time you do discover it, in many years time, you’ll have enough experience, practice and insight to be able to produce the artistic vision of which you alone are truly capable, because you will finally understand yourself.



Introducing IvoryFlame.