From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/23/02-11:34:47 PM Z
On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Jack Fulton wrote:
> Okay. Erotica.
> erot·ic
> Greek erOtikos, from erOt-, erOs
> Date: 1651
> 1 : of, devoted to, or tending to arouse sexual love or desire <erotic art>
> 2 : strongly marked or affected by sexual desire
> Hmm. I'd say, under your aegis, Edward's photographs fall into category
> numero dos . . . markings, so to speak, regarding his sexual desire. Maybe
> his name should have been Frank rather than Edward for that's the way he
> places his eye.
> The point I was attempting to make was in regard to the sexual revolution
> which came about in the 1960's but primarily in the 1970's. There are
> elements in society which need prior altruistic truths of representation so
> as to substantiate the new paradigm/premise. For instance, today one can
> visit the erotic frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum w/out permission. The
> Italian government (and you know those Italians and their libido . . or is
> it Lido) has decided to become' modern' so to speak. There is no other
> photographic work, than perhaps Emmanuel Radnitsky, which is so readily
> available, so much on the tongue of people's mind.
Oh etc. etc. etc. Jack, you of all people -- savvy, sophisticated, or so
I have always thought -- you are resolutely REFUSING to get the point.
Don't give me the history of Pompeii, don't talk about sexual revolution,
I can do sexual, revolution, tongue & groove with the best or worst of
them.
THE POINT IS THAT YOU USE THE TERM "NUDE PHOTOGRAPHY" TO MEAN FEMALE NUDE
PHOTOGRAPHY. There are whole books titled "Nudes" which turn out to have
only -- imagine ! -- young, shapely, FEMALE nudes. Where are the male
nudes? Sure, Mapplethorpe did them, others do them now, but that's recent
and not the genre...
When did EW do a naked man erotically posed? His torso of son was
strategically cropped, and anyway meant to look sculptural more than
erotical. Forget the dread aura and vocabulary of Abigail Solomon Goudeau
and read her passage again.
It is absolutely on the mark-- except she's ahead of many, including
apparently a few on this list. You have to start at the beginning (this is
how I get to sound like a broken record, except half the folks now alive
don't know what a broken record is, since they play CDs) by saying,
NAKED LADY IS ****NOT*** A NEUTRAL ART CONVENTION, IT'S AN EROTICIZED
STEROTYPE, WHICH IS NOT GOOD FOR WOMEN IN THE WIDER CULTURE. Or, to quote
myself, this "'art' showing naked women, but not naked men, is an
eroticized sterotype, harmful to women generally and one reason it's
harder for a woman past 40, when her boobs are beginning to sag, to make
partner."
Why harmful? For one thing, in our culture the people in power wear
clothes -- and that includes Edward Weston taking pictures of women
without clothes. For another, the perfect nubile YOUNG body is idealized,
making a woman of the age when MEN start to come into their power an old
bag.
To use the analogy of race, which folks seem to get when they don't get
the above (and I note that the dictionary had the word "racism" nearly a
decade before it had "sexism"): If the only or main photographs of black
people seen in the culture were bandana heads, barefoot "darkie" children
eating watermelon or other such stereotypes from genre photography of the
early 20th century you would understand why that would be harmful to the
aspirations of African-Americans, that those images would come into the
mind's eye in front of the living person, even instead of the living
person.
Now pick up any newspaper or news magazine and see how many women appear
who aren't nearly naked and swollen eyed in the underwear ads. OK, I just
grabbed section A, the news section of Friday's Times.... There is not
one, NOT ONE, not a single solitary editorial photograph of a woman, not
even Condoleeza Rice, not even Laura Bush, not even a Pakistani woman
group raped as penalty for trumped up charges against her brother.
You say some more following, Jack -- the part I understand fails to
address what I see as the point. (I'm being nice because you're so cute.)
best,
Judy
> Prior to the 1960's the only nudes one could find (I searched as a young
> lad) were generally nudist camp magazines. Then Playboy hit the stands. I
> even telephoned Marilyn Monroe one night when she was married to Joe
> Dimaggio and told her I was her paperboy and she hadn't paid her bill from
> last month. Imagine that, Mrs. Dimaggio was in the phone book. Now, how them
> naive apples. So, the point I was loosely making is that Weston and his
> nudes represent, in the American eye, the curator, museologist, hedonist,
> photogonist etc., an artist's view of the nude female. Since they were
> rather frank images and perhaps taken with an erotic POV but posed in a
> (don't' jump at me here) natural way . . . hey, look @ Imogen or Annie
> Brigman or what Isador Duncan did or represented. I have a nice book of
> nudes done in 1914 done by a Mr. Goetz here in SF and they are, polite.
> Frank, err, Ed wasn't. He was honest to himself and that can perhaps offend
> others. I believe the image of the toilet, 'Excusado', which means 'water
> closet' in Spanish, is done in a similar direct manner as is the famous
> pepper implying some lusty peccadillo. He knew what was different about his
> visioning. I presume that's one of the reasons he was so excited by the
> medium.
> Quite honestly, I'm a bit more offended by the Surrealists and their
> blatant innuendoes such as Man Ray's (or was it Marcel Duchamp) castings of
> the negative space between a woman's legs. They surely employed photography
> in a tricky fashion. Duchamp ripping off Marey like that.
> Anyway I fully appreciate and understand where you come from . . what your
> point is. However, I feel it is overt in this case and that Weston does mean
> something to the post 70's person who may be more libertine. He, somehow,
> did something in the photographic medium that others hadn't done. He went
> where angels feared to tread . . and it was in his backyard where he got off
> on rocks most of the time.
> I'm not saying he is the cause célèbre for Hustler and Playboy but was the
> forerunner of that milieu. He was, in a sense, their sanitized raison
> d'être.
> Jack
>
>
>
>
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