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‹ Photo Notes · 7 února, 2012
Today I have a short article for you to think over about photographs. On Sunday morning after the shoot I developed a new film, scanned the shot and published it on the internet. The photograph immediately met with an extraordinary response, mostly positive. Some people, however, were shocked and spoke of pornography and the like. I’m not writing the article because of this particular photograph; I meet the same question continuously and honestly it doesn’t bother me in the least, it is rather sometimes amusing to approach a model and hear „I don’t do porn“.
Before we get to the photograph itself, I’d like to mention one curiosity. Bed scenes in a film seem normal to everyone, everybody knows after all that the director asked the actors to act out a situation, nothing more. When a photographer shoots a similarly provocative erotic scene, he instantly becomes at the very least a bohemian, then a pervert, a beast and so on. The other part of the team, depicted in the picture, fares similarly and perhaps worse – hardly anyone would doubt the guaranteed dubious reputation of models. In the case of models it grieves me, perhaps that is another reason for this article.
Let’s return to the photograph itself – look at it for a while and tell yourself what you really see. Let’s not talk about feelings and atmosphere now. By clicking you can enlarge the photograph.
Purely technically – do you really see sex? There are five people in the frame, but about none of them can it be said that they are having sex, I’m sorry.
How are we doing with nudity? I see five persons and I know they are naked, but however I count, I can see in total about one and a quarter breasts, of which the whole is far outside the depth of field. No other „sexual characteristics“. At a swimming pool in summer you will certainly see more.
Probably the most frequent word around this photograph is the word „orgy“. As far as the mood of the photograph goes, that’s fine, something like that was meant to be evoked, although for someone it may be a photograph full of love, tenderness and passion, perhaps just with a somewhat larger number of people. And someone may see something entirely different there.
So what was the reality and how did it all go? I could, and perhaps should, leave you in the illusion that I captured one of the moments of a frenzied orgy, but this time I won’t – I have enough other photographs for that, which we aren’t discussing today and which I’ll leave to keep provoking your imagination.
The truth is that we enjoyed it very much. We had lots of fun and laughter in a group of superb friends. Taking this shot itself perhaps lasted fifteen minutes, as I moved individual people more to the left, more to the right, up and down, this part of the body more or less into the frame and so on. For the participating models it was occasionally uncomfortable to painful, and when I took the shot, they were quite glad to have it behind them. Fortunately I didn’t torment them for long; I photographed the whole scene only twice and chose and published the better shot.
I thank the participants of the photograph for their patience, their great courage and for what superb friends they are, because with strangers I couldn’t have shot a photograph that is staged and yet so natural; that requires, besides professionalism and talent, also a huge dose of trust.
To you who have read the article and looked at the photograph, thank you for your attention. To you who still see pornography in it, I can only wish many other, beautiful and more decent photographs.
I’ll be glad of your opinions.