This week we looked at the body: the form, functions and interactions.
Consider how are you corporeally connected an/or discoed with the spaces you conduct in your life. The structure of the body and how its distorted.
We begin to look at the body like a piece of still life.
The word naked is descried by Jonathan Jones as “some one with no clothes on” however naked can be linked to venerability as well.
Whereas the word Nude is quite a flattering word and doesn’t have to be vulgar. Thomas Ruff used stills from porn films and blurred them to question whether these naked portraits can be artistic as well. However some still just see them as pornographic photos.
For me I cannot get past the aspect they are essentially just pornographic photographs and I can’t really see the artistic side of the series.
Nadar did a similarly uncomfortable series about hermaphrodites.
Similarly to shows such as Embarrassing Bodies, we see male and female parts on this particular show we do not find it pornographic we use it as a confirmation that we are what we consider as ‘normal’
However some people watch the show as some sort of fascination from a scientific point of view.
Sally Mann – Proud Flesh. Larry Mann her husband suffered from muscle dystrophy and Sally photographed him through a series of intimate portraits however they are not all clear. Some are layered and some include textures and layers.
Hannah Wilke’s mother got diagnosed with breast cancer and so she created a series based around this.
I think the images are really intriguing and truthful. For some reason their is a big taboo agains’t photographing people when they are severally ill. Its almost as if people are scared to insult people with the sight of people with a serious illness and I think this is wrong as photographs are supposed to be forms of truth why shouldn’t we show how we truly look all the time?
Piere & Gilles.
This was the first male nude gallery exhibition and it caused quite a controversy and posters on the street had to be covered.
People are less okay with the male nude in general to the fame nude. It seems that in society the female body is deemed ‘appropriate’ to be seen nude however it becomes awkward when it is the male form.
John Coplans- asked his young photography intern to take photographs of his nude self. He sates that he becomes a different person and it’s liberating.
In the video he created he states that people don’t want to see Old people being photographed. He states that naked old people are a taboo and that people aren’t interested in old people because they are ‘going to die soon’.
He had an exhibition at the MOMA in New York and he would go down the exhibition and listen to people talk about his work. He states in the video that woman would love his work and say he’s exposing himself like woman do in nudes and thats great however men did not approve of the work.
The photographs are taken on polaroid by his intern and he used one light in the studio. Coplann’s states that his photographs are nothing to do with language and communicating they are physical states of being.
Carolee Schneemann.
Schneemann’s “Action for Camera” in which she merged her own body with the environment of her painting/constructions… “I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material– a further dimension of the construction… I am both image maker and image. The body may remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring, but it is as well votive: marked, written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative female will.”
This weeks task : you are asked to photographically consider how you are corporeally connected and/or disconnected with the spaces you conduct your life in. You may wish to examine the structure of the body and how it is distorted to serve certain roles or you may think about the time and locations in which the body shapes the environments it has found itself occupying.
For this task I decided to look into the way our bodies move when we sleep and in particular how I sleep differently with my partner to when I’m alone.
With more time and better equipment I would like to create a series of images through one night about the way our bodies move when we sleep next to each other and alone.
mquickphotography 