@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?

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…

Matt Medlen turned me on to this web site called Trash The Dress a month or so ago. At first I just glanced at it and resigned myself to look again when I wasn’t so busy. But I noticed that they had an RSS feed so I added it to my Google Reader. Then I forgot all about it.

Over the past few weeks, I keep noticing these really stunning wedding photos in my Reader, and when I looked up at what feed it was, it was Trash The Dress. That’s when I started paying attention. The site is a collection of really creative, outside-the-box photos of brides. It’s like fashion photography meets wedding photography, and it really makes me happy to think that there are some couples out there who are getting more than just the lame, cheap wedding photographer photos.

As a photographer, I also find the site very inspirational. There is a lot of creativity on display there.

Tuesday marked the beginning of a new year, and that means new regulations. Yes, our friends in the government have stepped up their vigilance in the war against photography - er, I mean terror. Starting with the beginning of this year, they won’t allow you to bring spare lithium batteries on your plane. Naturally, they don’t say why. So if you’re flying out to do some photography, you’d better make sure it can all be done on one battery.

Last September, Scott Kelby wrote about his experience in Minneapolis/St. Paul where TSA agents made him remove his DSLR camera from his camera bag and place it on the scanning belt separately, the way that you have to with laptops. Then they dusted his camera bag for explosives! They claimed this was part of a new policy instated in August which few airports have actually implemented. (Sounds like bullshit to me.)

It all kind of makes you wonder if some property of the lithium batteries doesn’t react well to the new security scanners. I wouldn’t be surprised if the batteries had a characteristic that prevented the scanners from seeing behind them, making them some sort of camouflage for other forbidden materials. I may just have to find myself a lithium battery from somewhere and take it with me next time I fly, just to see if they actually even notice.

After a very good shoot with Danielle last week, her roommate decided she also wanted to give modeling a try so this weekend I worked with Carla, and once again had a great time.

This serves to underscore the power of word of mouth. There are plenty of creeps out there, but there are also plenty of legitimate people. In one week, I’ve gotten calls from two different people thanks to Danielle’s word of mouth. If you’re fun and respectable and nice, word gets around quickly. I imagine it would have gotten around just as quickly if I’d been weird or perverted.

After the shoot, I was like a kid with a new toy, editing the photos in Lightroom.

Last week I was talking to Matt Medlen about new Adobe products when he asked if I had heard of Lightroom. I had not.

We went to Adobe’s web site and watched the video demonstration, and I knew immediately that I had to have it. Photo editing software designed for photographers by photographers? They’re not kidding. It works exactly the way I do!

Where Photoshop can be thought of as a digital darkroom, offering all the tools you need to make a single photo great, it is unfortunately quite cumbersome for any task involving more than one photo, and its tools are extremely technical and powerful, but this comes at a major price of user-friendliness. Anything I want to do to a photo can be done in Photoshop, but it takes a great deal of time, and comes with a high learning curve.

Enter Lightroom. The first, and most important feature of Lightroom is that it is 100% nondestructive. You can edit a photo all day long without ever altering the original. This not only allows you to preserve the maximum original quality of the photo, but also makes possible some space-saving ideas like burning a session to CD, and then working with the photos right from the CD rather than having to use hard drive space.

Because the edits are non-destructive, they’re treated as a series of actions, and that brings to mind another killer feature of Lightroom: if you have a series of photos all shot in the same conditions (for example, low light), and you make the necessary edits to one photo, you can then highlight the rest of the photos and apply those actions to the entire session.

The cropping tool actually overlays a rule of thirds grid onto your photo to assist in finding the best crop. And better, if you have to correct the horizon, the crop is constrained to the boundaries of the photo, rather than having those triangle-shaped white (or black) strips of background color on each of the corners.

And another huge feature for me is that exporting the session as JPEGs does not force you to do a bunch of math in order to calculate dimensions. You choose a maximum width and a maximum height and click export, and it will resize your photos for you, to within your constraints, while maintaining your aspect ratio.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg, but it was enough to make me certain I had to have this software. So now I have it. Of course my iBook was running OS X 10.3.9, and Lightroom requires 10.4, so after it installed, it refused to run…

I had the pleasure of working with a very pleasant first-time model this weekend, and made some nice photos in the process.