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Why nudes ? |
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Monday, 31 January 2005 |
There are many ways to take a picture of a person, and many of them involve them wearing clothes. There's nothing wrong with that, and in fact I rather like to portraiture. I've tried my hand at many styles of photography, but in the last few years I realized that my best images were studio nudes...
I'm not entirely sure why that is, but i have more ideas, I'm more comfortable working with a nude model than doing a portrait shoot. Inspiration comes to me easier, because I tend to look at the body as almost an architectural element, and lightning being a critical part of bringing that physical element to life.
I don't know if it's the fact that I've been wearing glasses for as long as I remember, and being short sighted I have a closer close focus point than "normal" people, but I tend to love fine textures, I love to touch, and I try to conver that sense of touch in the images I make. I try to make the image feel real, to make it palpable. This is one of the reasons for my taste for larger formats, since some subtelties of tones and details are best rendered in larger formats.
 A photograph tends to show us more that what we see in real life, and that's the reason why portrait photographers have had a tendency to use softer-focus lenses, to tone down the hyper-realism of photographs. And that's why fashion photographers re-touch every image to make it perfect, because details catch the eye in a photograph, whereas in real life, face to face with a person, we tend to see the general appearance and not necessairly focus on the details.
Now, what does it have to do with me doing nude photographs ?
I like flesh. There, I said it. It's an horrible thing to say for an artist, because it brings undertones of pornography and of shameful social taboos that are rather silly, when you think about it... I like the human body, I think it's a beautiful thing that needs to be celebrated and shown, and admired. It is the primal building block of our lives and identities, and I really don't mind that hundreds of thousands of photographers around the world are doing the same.
So, here's my why...
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