Some people have asked about the story I alluded to behind the creation the “Buy Me” photos, so I’ve decided to address that here rather than individually, so those who may be interested need not ferret out the answer from scattered comments. Fair warning: it is not at all salacious and probably nowhere near as interesting as you may hope. It is even, I may say, rather pedantic. But I have pronounced pedantic tendencies — it is, for better and/or worse, how I think — so at the risk of drizzling gray tedium over much more pleasing suppositions, I will here relate exactly why I decided to create these images.
These photos were something of a departure for me, as I don’t normally venture into fetish photography outside of a commercial context. But last week, a woman I work with told me about an ad she had seen that brought home to me some characteristics of our society and moved me to create these images.
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Owen |
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Admittedly, the title of this post has less to do with the subject matter than I desire to shoehorn a cute title into most of the things I do. But I have been meditating on the nature of art recently, most especially because of a piece by Michael Helms, which the Powers That Be on deviantArt, where Michael posts most of his work, saw fit to remove. Said work was judged to have artistic merit incommensurate with the controversy, potential or manifest, that attended upon it’s subject matter, so it had to go. I was fond of the work, which I found beautiful and thought-provoking, and in keeping with the highest traditions of good art, so naturally I was disappointed.
But what got me thinking was not that deviantArt’s management disagreed with me — for all I know they do not — but that they decided that this particular artwork was not worth supporting or defending, no matter what they thought of its esthetic value. What was, or could be, behind such a decision? The trivial answer must allow for purely personal reasons such as individual taste, personal pique, too much coffee or not enough, having a less than stellar day. But allow me to pose the question in the abstract, and consider it corporately and not merely individually. And to do that, I should start with the concept of Art itself; what it is, and where it comes from.
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Owen |
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This is obviously a question that has a significant amount of interest to us. But first, I’d like to clarify what I mean by “art”. I don’t mean just what is often called “fine art nude photography”, which is typically conceived of as sculptural nudes devoid of erotic connotation and usually presented in black and white. As those familiar with X-muse and our work will know, we see nothing at all inconsistent and incompatible in coupling the notions of art, the erotic, or the sexual — even the explicitly sexual. All of these are a just manifestation of eros, as the terms is originally and properly understood.
Nor do I mean to go into what constitutes art and what does not (I already recorded my thoughts on what art is — and isn’t — in this post). So I’m going to assume (dangerous I know) that we have a general agreement on what art is, the details of which may be safely left to subjective appraisal, and just muse on whether it is an economically viable product or not.
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Owen |
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Taking photographs is an odd business — cutting experience into thin slices of 1/60th of a second or so. What goes on in those many thousand 1/60ths of a second when the shutter is closed? Well quite a lot, of course, and that is the gulf that separates the photographer who was there and “saw it all” and the viewer who just sees those minuscule slices caught when the shutter was open. So photographs are not life, or anything very like it, but the photoshoot is not life either. A photoshoot is a collaboration (some might say a connivance) between the models and the guy with the camera to create images that reflect a state of affairs that in some sense never happened. If it is well done, the images will contain the truth of the subject, but only part of it — the part that the subjects and the photographer jointly agree that they want others to see.
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Owen |
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