Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 12:56 PM
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What a lovely view. Golden light, and her blonde hair glinting in the sun. Her breasts soft and full.
The sweetest thing is that this is a self-snap, standing over the camera that she's set on self-time. It reminder me of when she stands over me, offering her curls, and the wet soft skin beneath, to my waiting mouth.
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 8:49 PM
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This is a reposting of an article originally written by Sean O'Hagan for the Guardian. It is one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking articles we have ever read. Our sincere appreciation to Mr. O'Hagan for his work and we hope by helping the dissemination of this work, the conversation is carried to wider circles, resulting in deeper and more meaningful conversations around this topic.
Lamprou's Portrait of My British Wife – on the shortlist for this year's Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize – is a private moment made public. But when does art become voyeurism?
Photographers have taken explicit photographs since the invention of the form. It is still a surprise, though, to see Panayiotis Lamprou's image, Portrait of My British Wife, on the shortlist of this year's Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize. It is, as the Guardian's arts correspondent, Mark Brown, put it (perhaps understating the case somewhat), "arresting because of its intimacy". It begs the vexed question, when does art become voyeurism or, indeed, pornography?
Lamprou photographed his wife sitting outside their summerhouse on the Aegean island of Schinousa. She has just finished eating an omelette and the dirty pan sits on table at her elbow. She is staring at the camera with a gaze that is difficult to read, wearing a short dress – or long T-shirt – and nothing underneath. Her legs are apart and her vagina is visible beneath the skirt. There is something both coy and provocative about the portrait, which, according to the photographer, was not originally intended for public display. (What changed his – and her – mind?) It will be interesting to see how the National Portrait Gallerydisplays the image when they exhibit it in a show of 60 of the submitted portraits in November.
Detail from Jeffrey Stockbridge's photograph of twins Tic Tac and Tootsie Photograph: National Portrait Gallery/PA
Undoubtedly many visitors to the gallery will find the image shocking, even offensive. Ironically, its tone of languor and intimacy sets it apart from the other three shortlisted portraits, all of which are provocative in different ways. Indeed, both Jeffrey Stockbridge's portrait of Tic Tac and Tootsie, twin sisters who have turned to prostitution on the streets of Philadelphia to fund their drug addictions, and Abbie Trayley-Smith's portrait of a young girl at a charity for obese children, could be considered more voyeuristic and exploitative.
Lamprou's portrait, though, cannot use the defence of social documentary or reportage. It is a private, intimate moment made public and, however consensual the contract between photographer and subject – and husband and wife - much of its arresting power lies in this uneasy dynamic. Do we, as viewers of what was originally an intensely private exchange, become voyeurs?
Lamprou's intimately explicit portrait is a very different kind of photograph than, say, the formally driven Teutonic female nudes of Helmet Newton, the hardcore imagery of Robert Mapplethorpe or the garish art-porn of Araki. Neither does it fit into the fashion-porn genre indulged in by the likes of Terry Richardson. Again, it is the intimacy of the setting – and the fracturing of that intimacy – that sets it apart and may even, for some viewers, make it even more problematic.
In both its explicitness and its blurring of the boundary between the private and the public, Lamprou's portrait calls to mind the taboo-breaking work of the young American photographer, Leigh Ledare. His book, Pretend You're Actually Alive, is a visual and written portrait of his mother, an erstwhile exotic dancer, who is both a narcissist and an exhibitionist. Over the years, he has photographed her in various explicit poses, both alone and with a succession of younger lovers, and the titles alone - Mom Spread With Lamp (2000) – give some indication of the content.
When Nan Goldin included Ledare's work in her selection for theRencontres d'Arles Festival, last year, it caused considerable debate among visitors, many of whom found it either offensive or disturbing. (Ledare, for the record, is a charming, well-balanced individual, and the book does work, in an albeit disturbing way, as a fractured chronicle of a thankfully singular strain family dysfunction.) It does beg the – now quaintly old-fashioned – question, are some things better left to the imagination than the camera? Or, more pertinently, the gallery wall?
Interestingly, too, it is nearly always women who are the object of the camera's gaze in these provocative photographs. (Mapplethorpe, a gay man, and Richardson, a self-confessed exhibitionist, both turned the camera on themselves, but they are the exceptions.) Would, one wonders, a full-frontal photograph of a relaxed, sun-dappled Lamprou taken by his wife be as arresting or provocative?
A photograph by David Chancellor of a 14-year-old American girl hunting in South Africa. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery/PA
What strikes me most about Lamprou's portrait – apart, of course, from its explicitness – is its apparent casualness. It has none of the heightened formal power of David Chancellor's portrait of a 14-year-old girl astride her horse with a dead impala. Instead, it looks, at first glance, like a holiday snap – but that, too, is part of its odd, and confusing, power. The dirty pan, the cluttered table, and the blurred chair in the foreground are all familiar signifiers of that certain feeling of relaxed torpor that descends on us when we settle in to a holiday. It's just that the eye is drawn elsewhere; we are given licence to look, to linger, to transgress the boundary between the accepted and the forbidden – at a cost, perhaps, to all of us, the photographer, the subject and the viewer … and to our ever-shrinking imaginations.
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 8:27 PM
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My last year of college, my girlfriend Jennifer and I had flown up to Oregon for the Chirstmas holiday, where I bought a pickup to drive back to college to have for the last semester of senior year and to use to move. We wanted to make a road trip of it, so on New Years day, we set out in the new truck.
We drove south over the Siskiyou Pass and down into Northern California. We then turned East, to climb over the Sierras into Nevada. On the pass, we were caught in a huge snow blizard. It was literally a white out. Cars and trucks were spinning and fishtailing, and sliding into each other. It was truly terrifying. Even with the windshield wipers going full speed, all we could see was a pelting sheet of snow, and the blur of taillights. We pulled off the highway at the first exit we could.
The two main hotels by the off ramp were already sold out from other drivers like us trying to wait out the storm. Luckily, we found a room in a small motel. It was one of those places that sort of smelled like mildew and had rough skratchy towels and a lumpy bed. But for us, it felt like we'd completely lucked out. As the storm dumped snow outside and trucks and cars continued to swerve and collide on the highway, we kicked back, grateful to be safe, and warm, and with each other.
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 12:07 PM
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First Julia Roberts, then Drew Barrymore and now Hilary Swank has become the latest Hollywood star to boldly stride the red carpet with natural underarm hair. The 36-year-old joined her contemporaries at Elle Magazine's Women in Hollywood Tribute party last month at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.
The double Oscar winner looked stunning in a gold Calvin Klein bustier dress, with her overall sexiness enhanced by her soft tufts of golden hair subtly peaking from under her arms.
Sexy Sex blog applauds Swank for her fashion forward (or fashion retro) decision. Bravo!
Drew Barrymore at Marc Jacobs fashion show, 2005
Julia Roberts at the London premiere of Notting Hill, 1999
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 12:50 PM
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Breaking rules is so much more fun than following them. It's no surprise that the height of cocktail culture was during Prohibition. Modern pornography (as in photographs and films depicting sexual acts) was born in the prudishVictorian Era, and wife swapping and nudism entered the American vernacular in the repressed 1950s.
As Senator McCarthy was trying to call out communists, and as TV and magazines depicted perfect nuclear families, with father knowing best and mom pulling a hot ham from the oven, and the two kids studying at school and playing sports, there was just as much sexual libido as any other generation. Perhaps suppressing it only made it that much more exciting.
As any reader of this blog knows, I'm a huge fan of the flower power hippies and back to earth kids of the late 60s and 70s. Those skinny dippers at Woodstock and beyond really knew how to be natural out in nature, and are all the sexier for it. And while I completely advocate for an open and honest acceptance of human nudity in nature (see my other blog Naked Outdoors), I have to admit that a world without censorship and prudes would be a little dull. Some of the fun of stripping off clothes is the thrill of it being a little "inappropriate."
That's why I find this image so erotically charged. Just her nude body could belong to any era, but with the hairdo and cat-eye glasses, this is clearly the 1950s. She's maybe late 20s, early 30s? For the time period, she's probably a housewife somewhere in a new American suburb. Her husband has a steady 9-5, and in this post-war boom, they own a home. A nice white one-story ranch. And the home has a front yard with a driveway for their new chromed Chevrolet, and a big backyard.
Perhaps when her husband is at work and she's finished the dishes and laundry because she owns new washers and dryers and housework is done by modern machines and not by hand, she has more time for herself and relaxation. Perhaps she takes a towel and paperback novel into her big backyard, and in the sun, lays out, buck naked. It's something neither her mother or her husband would approve of, but that makes it all the more empowering.
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 10:27 AM
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In college we went on a retreat out to the desert. Some of the girls decided it would be a good idea to get up in the mornings and greet the sun with yoga. Naked.
It was a beautiful sight. We all had a relaxing week in the desert, hiking and eating and hanging out. It was so hot that once we stripped off our clothes, we really had no reason to put them back on. The sun felt great on our skin. The girls were comfortable in their nudity. No one shaved. Everyone was natural and free to be themselves. It really was a perfect week.
Posted by alfanihuiiiju9
Posted on 10:02 AM
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She wanted to get back to the land. She wanted to know what it felt live to live free and one with nature. She thought humans had gotten too far away from the basics and had lost touch with what did and didn't matter.
She'd recently graduated from the Environmental Studies program at her college. She was a smart student and loved to read. Thoreau was one of her favorites, and Walden changed her profoundly. She loved the reason he had taken to the woods: to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
She wondered if the very rules of society she'd been taught were just handed down from the Industrial Revolution. Ideas of schools being in large brick buildings, and learning coming from books, and work being done Monday - Friday, 9-5. Why was everything so compartmentalized, she wondered? Why did a human day not go any like a deer's? Why not eat when you're hungry, bath in a river, and if you have to pee, pee? She wanted to see how her thinking of herself and the land would change if she lived within its rhythms and pace, rather than imposing her schedules and ideas onto it.
So she wrote all this up and proposed an independent study for the term. She took to the woods, and stripped off any clothes she didn't need, and wore clothing only if cold. She gathered food, but ate only when hungry. She swam in the river, and when she had to pee, she just did. She began to feel more and more return of sensations, moods, and urges. She felt her instinct growing more acute, as well as her hearing and sense of smell. She grew leaner, but stronger. Her eyes clear and her lungs filled with clean air.
She knew, intellectually, that she would not be able to sustain this lifestyle more than a term. But, for a term, she did. And she found, as her hero Thoreau, that she had lived deliberately, and that would not die without having lived.
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