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Glamour makes me want to puke
January 04, 2006
This was originally posted and then devoured by evil bloggy monsters on December 20th. I’m going to try to reattach the comments that were made on the original post. We’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy the rantiness.
I’ve reached a certain point with my “modeling career,” for lack of a better way to put it, where I’m not entirely sure what to do with myself, because as much as I’m a model, I’m an art/porn/whatever critic ten thousand times more. Sure, I like seeing pictures of myself where I look curvy and glowy and pretty and asstastic and booblicious, but at the same time, pretty is kinda boring and lame. I know how to be pretty, I get it. Now let’s fuck some shit up.
Sometimes I look through portfolios of glamour photography or its latex-clad cousin, fetish photography, and I feel like shooting myself. Yeah, I like Helmut Newton too, can we fucking get over it? Who cares about portraying beauty? (Ah, inflammatory statements, how I love thee). Okay, lots of people. But why? It’s an ego thing, isn’t it?
Isn’t there something more interesting than cute pin-up girls, saucy dommes and softly lit models with perfect hair? I find this shit really seductive, true – I mean seduction is what these images are about, after all. But at the same time, I find it all a repulsive snoozefest. I want to fuck up those girls’ hair, smudge their makeup and see what happens. Will they cry? Good, maybe it’ll make for a decent goddamn picture. But the flipside can be dumb too – posey horror fashion fetishy lameness also makes me want to puke. You think you’re scary? I don’t care, I find you boring and trite.
Maybe in some respects this is why I like a lot of the less polished porn, especially stuff shot in the 70s, but also the amateur stylings of Neville Chambers/Rick Savage, Brazilian she-male porn and the like. People in these kinds of films inherently look kinda fucked up, kinda trashy, kinda bad – which I find majorly hot. Ugly is the new hot, goddammit.
The real deal is that this is just empty bitching, because I don’t really know what the alternative looks like (I am, after all, merely a critic). I just wish more people – models and photographers alike, would let go of the obsession with creating something NICE and BEAUTIFUL. There’s nothing in that except portfolio shots – but maybe that’s what most people are in for. Yeah, ok, looking ugly or bog forbid, FAT, is tough to grapple with as a model, but as a viewer, it catches the eye because its different, its tapping into something else.
[And yes, I know that this is seriously ironic because my portfolio is to be updated soon, and it includes plenty of the pretty girl type images I’ve just been bitching about. I am not exempting myself for this whole thing, just expressing a little old fashioned ranty rage.]
Posted by Dacia at January 4, 2006 09:44 PM
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Comments
I saw this post, since I tend to read all of my blogs out of Newsgator. Was there anything else that was “lost”? If so, I might be able to find it.
Just thought you might want to know.
Posted by: Ben at January 5, 2006 04:43 PM
I’d love to see photos that actually look like the person just had the best fuck of their lives. Women with sweat-dampened hair, little traces of make-up still visible around their eyes and lips. Men with their chests soaked, cocks glistening and just starting to soften. Stuff like that. Someone who’s eyes are saying, “I just fucked someone within an inch of their lives, you wanna be next?”
Posted by: Dausa at January 5, 2006 05:11 PM
Ben - there was one more lost post, but it was just a quicky announcing the Utne award, so no loss really. I save all my stuff in word anyway, so losing the text isn’t a problem so much as losing comments is.
Posted by: Dacia at January 5, 2006 05:32 PM
Six years ago or so I started photographing nudes. It wasn’t so much beauty I was trying to portray (or so I told myself). I wanted to make pictures that would make the viewer feel what I felt when I saw these amazing women undresssed, with their hypnotic curves and textures and gestures. I wanted people to stop and gasp at what they saw because it (the image) was simple and beautiful and not threatening (to people who freak out over nakedness). I never cared for the shocky pictures of photogs like Joel Peter-Witkin and while I enjoy fetish work sometimes it all seems so contrived at times.
And yet I conveniently made sure the women I photographed were exceptionally attractive in that more or less conventional way, which, I guess, is exactly what you’re complaining about.
But what’s wrong with that? Is it boring just because it’s been done? Is it boring because you think you don’t fit that profile?
I could photograph you and make you fit that profile. I could photograph you and make you look like a sack of flab. Isn’t intention the point? Ben’s comment is great. I’d love to make photographs like that (with “real” people, not porn actors, but I doubt I’ll ever run into anyone willing to do that without the kind of persuasion I don’t have in me). Unless they really are of “real” people who’ve just had sex they’d be just as contrived as the glammy fetish stuff.
And if you set out to photograph someone nude without the glammy baggage (perfect makeup, perfect posing, lighting, etc.) how do you do that in a “real” way? How real can it be to photograph a person in our culture naked? We’re a clothed culture and it automatically seems unnatural to see someone naked. In what situations are any of us normally naked in front of other people? Because unless it’s a self-portrait there’s someone there with the camera and then it’s not really a normal, natural situation, is it?
Rambling disconnected crap, sorry. I’m stumped so I just try to forget that and take the pictures I think I’ll like. Maybe someone else will like them also.
Posted by: Joseph at January 5, 2006 10:12 PM
