Listening to the Voices

After four years on here, I’m of the opinion that most folks know me pretty well. However, just for fun, I thought I would add some useless trivia about myself for those few who might be interested. So here are six things you never knew about me and probably never wanted to...

1) My favourite novel of all time is Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. (Lord of the Rings is pretty cool too.)

2) My favourite movie is The Thomas Crown Affair (the remake.) Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) is my icon – the woman I wish I could be. In fact, I reckon I’m most of the way there already *cough* I just need her clothes budget. (Aside: If anyone knows the recipe for the green gloop she drinks for breakfast every day, please can they send it to me, ‘ cos I’ve been searching for it for years....thank you SO much....)

3) Best photography movie: Guinevere (thanks to Stephen for recommending this one.) If you haven’t watched it, then make sure you do one day. Although it's not a fantastically made movie (and the ending is cringeworthy) it will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about around 75% of nude photographers (the other 25% are the ones I’m still talking to.) Honestly, I couldn’t add anything else – it’s all in here – a full photographer’s psychoanalysis in a film. Not an entirely pretty snapshot, but more accurate and insightful than most non-photographic people will ever know. Yes it really IS like that – in my experience anyway (and you can interpret that however you want.)

4) I have three rescue cats: Princess Sophie and two kittens called Leo and Custard. Although I’m a veteran at cat ownership, the kittens were certainly a bit of a challenge, even for me. They were feral and had been beaten and shut in a shed with no lighting and a dog that attacked them. As a result they were terrified of humans and attacked anyone who went near them. No-one else could cope with them so...over to us to try and sort them out. (We specialise in hissing, spitting, unwanted cats.) It took four months of patience, bribery and unrelenting gentleness before they started to trust us enough to come near us. They are curled up on my lap as I type this. In fact, it’s a miracle I can reach the keyboard at all, I have so many cats on me. Success!

5) Real food is incredibly important to me. Some of you know this already of course, but few realise just how fanatical I am about it. The hardest thing in the world for me to do is to keep my mouth shut when friends complain to me about their maladies that could be greatly improved (or better) by simply changing what they shove in their mouths. I just don’t understand why people eat processed food, I really don’t. I try not to talk about it anymore to anyone because I always wind up being really offensive. Always. It’s not a good trait, I’m afraid.

6) I am a crap photographer. No matter how hard I try (oh, for over twenty years now) I still suck. I can study photographic theory until I’m blue in the face, but we all know that taking a really “good” photograph involves a lot more than theory. You knew about my lack of photographic ability already. I’ve never made a secret of it.

However, what you might not know is that I have aspired to be an artist (the painting kind, not the writing kind), oh, since forever. Once upon a time (in my teens) I wasn’t bad at it either. In fact I was a straight A art student, but my parents forced me to stop studying it “and learn something useful instead, something that will make decent money.” (Hence my career in law/accountancy and my preoccupation with $$$, I’m guessing. Parents, eh? Don’t-cha just love ‘em?!)

Well enough already. For nearly thirty years now, there has been a tiny voice at the back of my mind, nagging me to stop looking at pretty pictures and get off my fat, insecure ass and make some real ones myself. I was the mistress of prevarication, always finding excuse after excuse. Frankly, I never thought I was good enough. But the voice in my head has become louder and louder until recently it started to REALLY YELL at me that I was running out of time and I’d better bloody well get on with it. So finally, finally, I’m going to listen to the tiny voice and actually try. Now, I don’t aspire to be really good. “Passable” would be just dandy. Really I’m just trying it “to see if I can.” This is a new hobby for me, a new adventure. So wish me luck - and before you ask, I'm far too shy to ever show my efforts here. But here's my blubbery ass instead:

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

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?

An obscure body in the S-K system

Part One: Lin

Zogi: Do you, Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe, take this Earthling Dale Arden, to be your Empress of the Hour?
Emperor Ming: Of the hour, yes.
Zogi: Do you promise to use her as you will?
Ming: Certainly!
Zogi: Not to blast her into space? [Ming glares at Zogi]
Zogi: Uh, until such time as you grow weary of her.
Ming: I do.
Dale: I do NOT!

Flash Gordon (1980)

Lin: I’m upset. Rich and I have had a row. Like all couples we have our moments, but this must mark as one of the weirdest rows that a normal, average, everyday couple has had. Why am I blogging about this publically? Well, this blog is supposed to chart our photographic journey together, the downs as well as the ups. I’ve always felt that others might be able to benefit from the story, others might simply find it entertaining, plus it’s a record for us when we look back in a year’s time and mark a turning point in Fluffytek.

So what’s this all about? Well, Rich is fed up with shooting studio nudes. He tells me that if he continues to shoot studio nudes, it will just be for me and the blog, not for him. He’s says that he’s finishing off his current commitments (two more shoots in the next month or so) but after that he’s going to photograph other stuff, you know…non-naked stuff. If nudes pop along occasionally, he says he won’t turn them away, but from now on things will be different. He wants to create images of other things (he’s not sure what exactly) but he says he’s done with photographing nekkid chix for a while.

I’ve been racking my brains to try and figure out if I’m responsible for this? O.K. My Darth shot was pretty bad, yes, but I don’t think it’s enough to put any photographer off the entire genre! And just because I personally wanted to model some non-explicit stuff for a while, that wouldn’t be enough to do it surely? It’s not as if I want to stop him shooting nekkid chix…quite the opposite. I always encourage him to shoot more, more, more, not less. I love and support his erotica. It totally rocks. And he’s just starting to get published, to get the recognition in the genre that he deserves. Why quit now just when he’s getting really good?

Weird. Scary. I don’t like change.

Just when you think you know someone and you think they’re blissfully happy, they go and turn everything upside down again. That’s artists for you, I guess.

To my knowledge I’m the only woman I’ve ever known who had a blue fit because her partner doesn’t want to photograph nekkid chix any more. It should be the other way round, surely?

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Cheeky Lee

Part Two: Rich

The Emperor Ming the Merciless: Klytus, I'm bored. What play thing can you offer me today?

Flash Gordon (1980)

Rich: Lin is upset. I’ve decided to cut back on nude photography for a while. Truth be told, I’m not particularly fed up with photography or with photographing gorgeous nude women, it’s just that I want to separate the two for a bit.

I never started nude photography for the social aspect, and I certainly didn’t do it because I wanted to be in the same room as a naked woman. I decided on studio photography not only as a way of studying lighting, but also as a way of realising the pictures in my head (I hesitate to use the term creative vision, but you know what I mean.) I have a pretty vivid imagination, and the camera was an excellent way of making those pictures as real as I could get.

I will admit that I’m a bit jaded with studio photography. Once upon a time, not so long ago, only a few UK photographers did the studio nude genre with this type of lighting. Now this style has been dissected, studied, reverse-engineered and everyone’s doing it. It is no longer unique because every man and his mother does it. Look on Deviant Art and you’ll see hundreds of these every week. They’re all the same.

But it’s much more than the inevitable matter of it’s all been done before. Whereas some photographers live for the process of photographing a subject, the camera has always been just a tool for me. I don’t live for the process I’m afraid. I live for the image, the end result. To me it doesn’t matter if the picture in my head is painted with a brush, shot on camera or generated on a computer, as long as the finished image is what I feel it should be.

Just recently I’ve found that the camera can’t accurately express what’s in my imagination. The tool isn’t right and I’m left with a half-finished picture. Don’t get me wrong, photography has taught me exactly what I wanted it to: lighting, composition, form. I can do the above type of shots with my eyes closed, but I’ve learned to do the basics well and now I need more. It’s time to move on, and the only way I can really create the finished image that I want to create is via CGI. I’ve been experimenting with this relatively new tool for a while now, but last year the technology simply wasn’t advanced enough for what I wanted to do. However in the last few months there have been several new tools released which are the next generation in rendering, and they’re pretty cool, almost photographic quality, and the flexibility is now there such that I can finally do what I want to do.

But why CGI? Well, because I’ve always been a computer geek, it’s probably inevitable that I return to using the computer as my paintbrush. Not only is it a heck of a lot of fun learning something new, but it’s the only way I can create the images that really reflect my imagination. Lin needn’t worry. In due course there will still be lots of nekkid chix on the blog, but eventually some of them might be the cyber-chix rather than real ones. I’m not giving up photography, but I need to step back a little and wait for photography to tell me what it wants me to do. In the meantime, CGI is my new toy, and I’m looking forward to playing with it.

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It's a nude Jim, but not as we know it

The Google Game

Buck-naked nude nudes!

Naked nude female models

Why are two world class photographers playing the Google Ranking Game?

Are they addicted to the number of hits themselves, the power, the fame of having over 100,000 hits a week, the glory of being the world’s most visited nude blogs?

Guys, RELAX…..maximum hits are just for the masses….the quality of your Art is more important than the number of hits you get from tens of thousands of guys looking for cheap thrills.

Of course, it helps that your work quality is absolutely world class anyway, and that you are two of the best nude photographers in the world, but since the majority of people hitting your blogs are just frustrated pervs looking for non-paying ways of getting off, (pervs, we love ya, please don’t leave us!), why the fascination with being on page 1, 2 or even 10 of Google?

Doesn’t the Google hit obsession mean that you are as addicted to the hunger for glory as some power-obsessed glamour models looking to be the next Jordan? (For those outside the UK, Jordan is the UK’s number 1 glamour model, and a damn fine business-woman to boot. Google her! Jimmy D, you should shoot her!)

Shouldn’t the fact that you’re making world class Art mean much more to you? (Yes of course it does) Or can you actually have both? World class Art and be the world’s most visited nude blog? (And not attract the plebs that can’t appreciate Art if it spanked them on the bottom with a paddle)

Note I’m definitely not criticising, (in fact I’m jealous of your rankings and Google marketing technique) plus I’m searching for the reasons behind the nude rankings issue, the reasons why the photographer chooses to market his blog this way, what he’s looking for? Are all blogs just a marketing exercise? Is this what I'm doing unconsciously by writing this? BTW, an answer to the meaning of life as we know it would also be handy, while you’re answering all these questions.

On the other hand, if a photographer is earning an income from his work, then I can certainly understand the need to push up those Google ratings. Everyone’s gotta eat.

Talking of which, in preparation for our major day-job software release, Rich and I are spending several weeks revamping our main web site. As we are an internet software company, we depend on customers hitting our web site, and since most folks only look on page 1 of a Google search, it becomes critical that we are listed on page 1, for the UK anyway.

So I’ve been spending the week optimising the Google lingo….software terms which might be Googled by potential customers, and making sure the appropriate wording is located near the top of the front page.

Getting listed on the first page on a Google search is an art-form in itself. There are no current manuals to tell you how, the books and web articles written on it are hopelessly out of date, and beyond the obvious optimisation techniques, it seems largely a matter of trial and error. Of course, the quality and number of links to your web site/blog helps, so the better the links, the higher in the ratings you go. This is just as, if not more important, than putting keywords at the top of the page.

In addition, the latest Google spiders are "country sensitive" for some topics. This is a big problem for a small international internet software company like us, which means that there is no hope of getting our software listed on say, the US pages, unless we pay $5 a hit via Google Ads. And no I’m not kidding about the cost. Google Ads are a significant part of our overheads. This strategy was specifically designed and implemented by Google last year so as to boost their turnover, and of course, their share price too.

Google’s spider is a mysterious acromantula. No-one can fathom its algorithm, which changes every few months anyway, so just as you think you’ve got it sussed, Google changes the way it works, yet again, and you’re back to square one. Of course, Google has thousands of servers, but they appear to be governed by two main mothership Search servers. These both work in entirely different ways, and generate the hits and Google rankings differently. Every three weeks the two mothership Google servers switch, so whilst you may find yourself on page 1 for three weeks, and raking in loads of hits (and cash), by week 4 the servers have switched, and you are on page 5, have no income, and are starving to death.

To make matters worse, if you ever experience the unfortunate occurrence of being blacklisted by Google (surprisingly easy to do if the spider mistakenly thinks you are ghosting,or doing some other forbidden thing on Google’s secret list, which I might add, also changes on a regular basis), it takes at least 12 weeks (and sometimes up to 9 months) to get listed again. Pleas, emails, phone calls, begging simply don’t work. You just have to spend weeks guessing what you’ve done wrong, and pray that their spider forgives you some time soon before your house gets repossessed. We have been through this three times now, and it really sucks.

Google own your soul, and don’t you forget it.

And yes, yes, Gary, I do realise you were simply congratulating Don on his Google ranking. You’re not at all bothered about your Google rankings I’m sure.

And Don, I love ya, please forgive me….don’t forget to put those naked chicks/nekkid chix keywords at the START of the post, and BTW, if you ever want a new job optimising our Google rankings, you know where to find us……..



Roswell Ivory, in a pose which is vaguely spiderish (at least I thought it was!)