@Randem

A friend and fellow photographer, Noah Huber, recently offered some thoughts on the female nude as a subject of art, in what appears to be an attempt to get people thinking, and perhaps get the discussion rolling. Nudity finds its way into my photographic work as well, so I think it fitting and fair for me to offer a few thoughts. Since this is a response and/or continuation of that topic, I encourage you to read it first.

Noah refers to Ways of Seeing, a three-part video series by John Berger that originally aired on the BBC — udging by the clothing and hairstyles, I would estimate almost 30 years ago. Part 2 of the series deals with the female nude, so that is what I watched. Noah’s links seem to have broken themselves, but I was able to find the program on YouTube in four parts:

John Berger, Ways of Seeing - episode 2 (1/4)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing - episode 2 (2/4)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing - episode 2 (3/4)
John Berger, Ways of Seeing - episode 2 (4/4)

I found myself quite engrossed in the opinion of the woman Berger was interviewing toward the end of the third clip. She (rather humbly) suggests that women gather their opinions of themselves from the people around them, whereas men gather their opinions of themselves from the world around them.

I’m going to be a bit presumptuous and attempt to express this thought differently, through huge broad strokes and generalizations. Deal with it.

Women form relationships with the world, whereas men objectify the world.

My take
Women form a relationship with everything and everyone they invite into their lives. A bad day at work makes for a bad day at home. A positive relationship with a lover translates into a happier commute. Etc. When relationships are good, the food tastes better, the sun shines brighter, and the birds sing prettier songs. However, when relationships are bad, a typical woman may lose sleep, stop eating, stop dressing nicely, etc.

Men are different. Men can leave work at work, and leave home at home. A man can work with someone for 10 years without ever knowing (or caring) if they’re married, or have children, or play a musical instrument. I chose the work objectify above for a reason: men objectify everything. Bad relationship with a family member, coworker, lover? No problem, because with a change of scenery, it’s out of mind. But if a man ever gets the feeling that he’s not making a mark on the world, steer clear.

What does this have to do with photography? With nudity? I’m sure you’re already beginning to see some connections, but let me spell it out. In my lifetime, the complaint has always been that placing a nude woman on display — whether in a topless bar, or in a men’s magazine, or in an underwear ad on a billboard — is objectifying them.

Hmmm. Well, no shit.

But so what?
What’s wrong with that? I always hear people argue as if it’s wrong, but I’ve never heard any establish that it’s wrong. Why do you suppose that is? Here’s a hint: because it’s not wrong.

A man objectifying a woman is, quite frankly, no different from a woman trying to form a relationship with a man. Women do what women do, but for some reason it’s wrong when men do what men do. That sounds pretty hypocritical if you ask me.

But hypocrisy is nothing new. Women buy and sell and read and watch smut day in and day out (romance novels, soap operas, Ellen Degeneres) with little more than a grumble from the opposite sex. Meanwhile, men’s smut gets placed under counters in buildings with the windows blacked out; it gets moved to the upper cable channels, late at night; it gets legislated and demonized.

Perhaps the absurdity of the situation would be more evident if men began protesting women’s behavior in the way women have protested that of men. What if there were a Men’s Liberation movement? What if there were masculinists, who gathered in the streets to protest Harlequin romance novels for their portrayal of men? What if men got up in arms over the way they are represented by Dr. Phil and Oprah?

Gender bias?
Look, I’m not writing this to gripe about the disproportionate treatment of the genders, because the fact is that there are still a lot of levels on which history and society has been unfair to women. All I’m getting at is that perhaps the topic of the female nude really has nothing at all to do with any form of oppression.

Is it a gender bias? Yes. One that favors women! If there were anything more than a niche market for men to pose nude, men would be all over it. And if the roles were reversed, men wouldn’t be complaining about how unfair it is: they’d be basking in their own glory.

Women should learn to profit from it, the way that men are profiting from the woman’s need for relationships — or, at least that’s the advice a man would give, since we’re more concerned with objects. Like money.

But is it art?
So, coming back around, is the nude female art? Yes. Absolutely. As was stressed in Berger’s film, “nudity” is just another outfit that one can wear. Being nude is not the same as being naked. To be naked means to be real, honest, unposed, exposed exactly as you are — whether clothed or not — and that is not art, it’s documentary.

It is, in my mind, perhaps the artist’s greatest irony, that the nude can represent nakedness, but it can never be naked. Nudity can express love, hate, fear, excitement, comfort, pain… anything except for reality. I don’t think there is any question that nudity is art.

I think the real question is why it favor’s women as subjects. Frankly, I think there is simply a much bigger audience for the nude female. I don’t believe there’s any gender oppression at work here. I believe it’s just simple economics. The free market. Supply and demand.

While not every woman watches General Hospital, or Oprah, I think we can say fairly that most women enjoy drama, whether it’s daytime tv, or Grey’s Anatomy, or Harlequin novels, and that while there are some male consumers of these products, it would be foolish to say they’re statistically significant. Those products are consumed by women, so their creators design them primarily for women.

By the same token, I believe that the nude-as-art is primarily consumed by a male audience, and I believe that it is for that reason that the subjects tend to be female. After all, art is designed to communicate — what good would it be to communicate if you have no audience?

“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.” — Gen. George Patton

The results of the latest creative humor writing contest are in. The theme was quirky job placements.

I didn’t crack the top three, but I submitted three one-liners, and all three of them (politics, sanitation, computers) were listed among the honorable mention. Judging by some of the others in the list, however, I’m guessing it didn’t take much to get honorable mention this time around…

The Freakonomics Blog takes a look at the early warnings of Itzhak Ben-David, who seems to have seen this whole mess coming a mile away. I wonder why nobody else did.

What complete and utter idiocy, that people have demonized the act of taking a photo. In the latest example, security at London’s Spitalfields market made an attempt to forcefully delete photos taken by a patron of the market.

Here in London, you get photographed upwards of 300 times a day, by every junior sneak, pecksniff, and petty CCTV operator who can afford a cheap little camera. The cameras often fail to help catch criminals, and they certainly don’t deter desperate muggers and junkies and stupid drunken kids. All the law seems to require by way of consumer protection is a sign saying, “You’re being filmed.”

You can be photographed again and again, but heaven help you if you take a picture back. Your person isn’t deserving of any serious privacy protection, but buildings, t-shirts, shop-windows, and market stalls are all entitled to unlimited protection from having their precious photons stolen.

It really bothers me to no end. Seriously. I would like to know exactly what devious mischief they think is going to come about from someone taking a photograph.

Or perhaps it’s not so much that they fear the patrons committing the mischief, but perhaps that there is some bigger mischief already afoot, which they wish to prevent people from capturing. Kinda makes the mind wander…

I am growing more and more convinced that the CSI franchise is the worst thing to happen to television since the A-Team. Why do people swallow this steaming load of horse excrement?

I’ve mocked the lousy acting and cheesy one-liners of CSI:Miami for quite some time. And I’ve always thought it was funny how productive the CSI crew manages to be in a city as corrupt and useless as Las Vegas. But the true gravity finally hit me during last night’s episode of CSI:NY.

Never mind the bad dialog and the overly dramatic acting gestures before key lines (like the coroner, who violently disassembles his eyeglasses before alerting the investigators to the cause of death). And I’m going to ignore the “cosplay dance club”, where people were just a little too normal, danced a little too well, and there was no Hello Kitty, or Han Solo, or Pink Power Ranger. And I’m even willing to overlook the fact that the NYPD crime lab — a small division of a taxpayer-funded public service — has a three-panel CISCO videoconferencing room.

World’s greatest hacker
The suspect is a computer super-hacker who is also a contract killer, and she drums up business by running a packet-sniffing spider that grabs key words and phrases from emails. The logistics of such a technological feat are mind-blowing at the ISP-level, yet nobody seems bothered by the crime lab’s inability to trace any of this.

They are, however, quite impressed by her ability to create and use an untraceable email address! And then, in spite of the seeming impossibility of creating an untraceable email address, the very next scene shows the lead investigator ordering a CSI to create six of these impossible to trace email accounts!

A really keen sense of smell
Even with their technical ability to deduce mind-blowing things from a vial of trace chemicals, the biggest break comes from a hunch about a gun being hidden in a speaker at a public speaking event.

So how do they find the hidden weapon? With a gun-sniffing dog! Are you kidding me? I’ve heard of suspension of disbelief, but are we seriously supposed to buy this crap? Dog’s can’t sniff for guns!

Who’s in charge of whom?
And now, with the evidence and the motive established through extended use of Deus ex Machina, the forensics lab (after all, that’s what CSI is) sets up a sting operation. The forensics lab! And the lead forensic investigator is barking orders at uniformed cops, undercover cops, a SWAT team, and even FBI agents!

Worse than Charlie’s Angels

Now, with the sting in action, the suspect catches on and runs away (in four-inch stilleto heels!) and not a single one of the officers surrounding the area is able to catch her.

This isn’t a problem, though, because the lead investigato, who is orchestrating the operation from atop a building while watching through binoculars, manages to get down to the ground and is the only person who is able to catch up to the suspect, who has deftly stripped off her outer garments to foil the description they’re looking for.

And now, while outrunning everyone in four-inch heels and stretch pants, she reaches into the back of her pants and pulls out an enormous gun, complete with silencer attached. Where the hell was that hiding? And worse, when she fires it, it makes gunshot sounds, not silencer sounds.

It’s all a bunch of crap
Week after week, all of these shows depict city police crime labs using technology that is more advanced than NASA to create holographic reconstructed faces. They use computers more impressive than the fiction in Minority Report, capable of doing face-recognition from a database of millions of people in mere seconds.

The characters know everything. You casually mention a rare, complex chemical and they’ll smugly ask you, “oh, you mean that rare, untraceable nucleotide used by midget amputee sherpas to regulate the glucose level in their yak milk at high altitudes?”

The CSI franchise takes the ridiculousness of A-Team, mixes in the foolish sagacity of MacGuyver, adds the writing talent of Star Trek, shoves it all into the south end of a north-bound cow, and then craps it out all over your television screen.

Finally, a rap that I can relate to.

I made my start in photography with a 1-megapixel point-and-shoot Sony digital camera many years ago. I bought it from a friend, used, because that was the only way (at the time) that I would afford a digital camera. It was nice to be able to try a lot of things and see the feedback immediately on the little screen on the back of the camera, and nicer that I could delete the duds and keep the good shots, and not spend money doing so.

As I read and learned about photography, however, it became obvious to me that I was going to need some features that the little point-and-shoot unit didn’t provide. I needed control over exposure by way of aperture and shutter speed settings — not just the little +1/-1 EV adjustment. I needed manual focus. I needed to know what an f-stop was. Basically, I needed an SLR.

Digital SLR cameras were far too expensive for a guy who could only justify the cost of a used P&S, but eBay was ripe with used film SLR cameras at awesome prices, so I started learning to shoot film with a Canon AE-1.

My experience with film taught me the guts of photography. I learned how light affects silver grains, and how time and temperature of certain chemistry sets the exposed grains and removes the rest. I learned how the size of the aperture was proportionate to the focal length of the lens, and how that related to film speed and overall exposure. I learned how to get a proper exposure without a meter.

The most important thing that film taught me, however, was to value every single shot. When you have only a finite number of shots per roll of film, and only a small number of rolls, you tend to be more selective about what you shoot. And when you have to develop, dry, cut, and print your film before you get to see how it came out, you spend more time thinking about all the details before you press that button.

Over recent years, I’ve witnessed (and occasionally participated in) a number of debates over which is superior: digital, or film. In the beginning, I was very partial to film. But I think at this point in time, most digital SLR cameras produce superior images where color photography is concerned. However, there is still little doubt in my mind that a quality shot on black and white film, printed by hand in the darkroom, produces a result that dramatically outshines anything you can do in the digital realm.

The instant feedback and the low cost-per-shot of digital photography are awesome learning tools, and not to be trivialized. But the fundamental skills and knowledge that come from the film experience are also important. I believe that anyone wishing to become a truly talented photographer should invest time learning from both formats.

It puts a big smile on my face when I see digital photographers exploring our film-based past. It’s kind of like a modern street-racing enthusiast parking the Honda and spending some time under the hood of a GTO. Modern technology is amazing, and often superior in many ways, but there are valuable things to learn from our roots, and sometimes some irreplaceable experiences, too.

Woops. April Fools.

Recent headlines have trumpeted the 2.9% increase in housing sales for February as an indication (aimed at people like me) that the housing market is back. But this is cherry-picking data at its finest. This is month-over-month data, which The Street knows is not the whole picture:

Year-over-year February sales were down nearly 24%, which hardly seems to paint a picture of a market that is luring back buying. But since the Journal used the word “lure” and is talking about a near-term development, let’s look at those January to February numbers in the proper perspective. Remember: we need to see whether there is a typical seasonality to them. And guess what! There is. Over the past four year, February sales have been more than 7 times greater than January sales. That means this year was less than half as good.

Wait a second… so if I’m understanding this correctly, that 2.9% increase is really a phenomenal decrease, when compared to last year’s month-over-month data. If this was a stock, that would be a flashing red light to “sell! sell! sell!”