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Friday, March 4, 2011

'Blatant Nudity' was the first title that came to mind.

     Haha.     Anyway, I am an artist, and I've spent twenty years making drawings from the human figure, both clothed and nude.  I like bodies, but drawing the figure was part of my course curriculum in the various schools and classes I attended.  I'm always looking for ways to express the human form.  For this one, I found a stock photo that I liked, and photographed that.  It's quite a change in effect from the original photo.  Especially in the portrait of the head, she still conveys nudity as her shoulders are bare.  In the second photo, nudity is blatant, but there is no identity to the body, except in the photo above it, which you assume belongs together. The breasts are obviously fake....implants.  Then I noticed something about the vagina.  It looks like the photographer used black electrical tape to cover the labia, perhaps to give the area darkness for the black and white photo, or perhaps to....wait, maybe he just used a black permanent marker on that area.  The pose is about 'empowerment, yet she has implants for breasts, and her vagina is modified.  Her face has make-up with lots of mascara.  She is naked without being nude.  Or is it the other way around?  The artificial aspects of her body make it seem so that she is not naked at all.  She has artifice to hide behind.  Presumably, she got paid a fair amount by the photographer.  With all the make-up on her face, she would not be easily identified in public for this photo, therefore, she is not afraid to model nude.
     The nude female body is a beautiful thing, and she is certainly beautiful.  She has excellent muscle tone, indicating she must do yoga or ballet.  Her breasts and face almost look out of place with the rest of her body, though.
     The portrait portion is very thought provoking on its own, and there is no need to show the rest of her body.  She is looking upwards, perhaps in contemplation.  The hands and arms are not shown, and only later do we discover she is flexing, and is perhaps making a statement about female power.  In the first photo, all that doesn't matter.  She says it all with no real nudity at all.  The portrait and the body become two different things.  It is often difficult for anybody to acknowledge all aspects of a person, all at the same time.
     Knowing nothing about this woman still gave me a chance to examine certain aspects of portraiture, the expression of nudity and nakedness ( which is which? ), the real and the artificial, the staged and the unstaged, natural vs. imposed...I learned a lot from doing this photographic exercise.  It is also an examination of what is pornography and what is not.  If it was porn, would that be bad?  Who knows? 













          Depending on where I took the photograph with its distance from the computer screen changed the lighting subtly, and creates different moods.  The lighting in my art studio actually affected how these photos came out, changing them ever so slightly from the original.

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