Naughty nudity plagued my upbringing. I was not a Playboy model/centerfold. I wasn’t the type. I didn’t want to be. What was it about the naked female form that sold so many magazines? What was different from the “Photography Today” magazines’s nudity? Was the ‘high’ art nudity a cover, a lie to allow pornography to exist, to allow what wast an intrusive photographic “looking machine” to see with composition, and interpretation and, by implication, art? Was naked photography imitating high art nudity or was it just exposure of the vulgar and not expressive, just prurient voyeurism and definitively NOT art? I was having some issues with composition, wanting to be a three dimensional artist, so I decided to classify, like Aristotle, the Female Form Frozen (mostly on film) in two dimensional popular photography as practice for later 3d compositions. I got permission from Playboy, which was to occupy most of my classification efforts. Seven years later, when I had completed the collages for the book, Playboy in Sears Tower told me they had different lawyers and would not allow derivative works. I did a series of angry dirivitive works based on the Female Form Frozen collages in an attempt to create works which would tempt the imposition of the most potentially expensive fines for copyright infringement ever imposed. At 10,000 dollars or 100,000 per infringement, that would make these protest and “AGIT SLOP” art pieces the potentially most expensively civil suit fined art pieces ever created, containing thousands of images from copyrighted neudy magazines. These pieces investigated the nature of the porn/erotica/obsenity questions that were in the courts at the time. They were called “Strips” . Sure, I’ve been convinced to work on The Male Form Frozen on Film, but the female form was so much a part of the serial magazine culture and it all confused me so. I wanted to do glamour and artist nude photography, but I wasn’t sure what that meant and what was illegal and what was acceptable and what was art. Here, in the following pages, is the breakdown and the verbiage for the collages. I started thinking of the classifications of Poses and Parts. I wanted to be a photographer who was able to show something beautiful about any model. My own portrait attempts, even in black and white, weren’t so successful. I went to photography class, but was shy to ask models to pose for me.
Poses and Parts seems sort of dissective to me now, but it was the basis for classification.
Behinds or bodies ‘from behind’ show the difference between a parts or a pose designation. I’m not sure I did a parts page of behinds, having been distracted by the poses ‘from behind‘.
PARTS
The part that seemed to cause an inordinate amount of obsession was the mammory glands or, rather, the breasts. Breasts were being reshaped by plastic surgery and, reportedly, all breasts and bodies, at some point, that could be seen in Playboy were unreal, ‘enhanced’, augmented and falsified but still seemed to attract positive attention.
Faces were my favorite, the window to the soul being part of my mythological life, what I thought I saw before I started studying makeup and hair manipulation in popular images.
Legs have made many images in the beauty business as parts that were well shaped or attractive. I wonder how much my concepts of beauty were tainted by seeing these images. I think about the differences now that stockings and panty hose aren’t in favor as daily wear.
More and more, my collaging was moving toward types of poses to display the parts. There is a beautiful face or breast or leg possible, but how the posing is done seemed to matter as well, especially if one didn’t have complete choice of any model in the world.
Behinds 1. Butts. 1Breasts 4Haircuts. 1 . Red Hair. 1Shoulders and Collarbones 2 . Backs 1 Bellies 1Breasts 4 . Faces. 3 . Freckles. 1 . Green Eyes. 1 . Hair. 4 . Hands and Feet. 1 . Legs. 3 . Pale Skin. 1 Tongues 1 Waist. 2 . Tan Lines. 1 . Muscle Definition. 2
POSES
As mentioned before, “From Behind” is an enticing and often flirty way to show the woman. It is a great way to accentuate and deemphasize various differences from body to body, model to model.
Profile and Quarter Profile. 3 . Pulling on Clothing. 1 . On Back 4 . On Elbows. 4 On Knees. 8 On Stomach. 5 . Dressing and Undressing. 6 . Eyes Engage. 1 . Curved Back. 1. Straight vs. Curved Backs Chin Down. 1 . Angle of the Dangle 2. Dangle Angle. 1 Arms Raised. 5 . Bodies Together. 3 . Bodies in Motion, Exercising, Dancing. 3 . Body To Body. 1 . Chin Over Shoulder. 2 . Hands on Hips. 3 . Leaning 4 . Legs Open. 1 . Lifting and Pulling Clothing. 2 . Looking at Camera. 1 . Playing With Hair. 1 . Raised Legs. 11 . Twist Body. 1 . Sitting 1 Squatting. 1 . Squished. 1 . Straight Back 1 Straight vs. curved back Touching Self. 5
CLOTHING
Clothing as Expressive. 1 . Sunglasses. 2 . Skirts and Dresses 7 . See-Thru. 5 . Bathing Suits. 8 . Boots. 1 . Boudoir Wear. 7 . Color in Clothing 2 . Cotton White. 2 Falling Out of Clothing, Undressing. 6 . Feathers and Fringe. 2 . Fur. 1 Glits. 3 . Gloves. 1 . Gowns 3 . Knits 6 . Leather 1 . Pants and Pants Suits. 5 . Shirts and Tops. 3 . Shorts , Hot Pants. 1 . T-Shirt Style. 2 Clothing to Cover and Shape. 1
TECHNICAL STUFF
Asleep. 2 . Caught By Surprise. 1 . Caught Mid-Action 1 . Cloth to Focus and Cover. 1 . Color Blocks. 1 . Color, Focus and Shaping. 3 . Composition. 7 . Crop. 1 . Dark and Light 1 . Depth of Field. 2 . Disheveled. 1 . Geometric Shapes. 1 . Hair Arranged. 1 Hints of Roundness 4 . Light Stripes. 1 . Lighting. 4 . Lipstick and Red Accents. 1 . Monochromatic. 4 . Monochromatic Vs. Chromatic 1 Obvious Composition. 1 . Phones. 1 . Silhouettes 3 . Skin Framed 1 . Skin Impressions. 1 . Skin Under Cloth Shapes 2 . Skin Cover. 1 . Suds 3 . Sunlight 1 Texture 5 . Texture With Light. 1 . Theme. 12 Use of Color. 6 . Veils and Blurs. 2 . Water as Texture. 6 Ways To Cover. 3 Ways to Cover Up. 1 Wet and Wet Clothing. 2 . What’s The Story? 1