New Stuff I'm Looking At Part 2

Another pretty important aspect of Endi and Danielle's critique was the way I was portraying myself in my photographs. Although the subject matter was pretty revealing (and by that I mean I revealed quite a bit of my body), however, the photographs were not overtly sexual or really sexual at all.

I'm intrigued by the way sexuality is changed and shrouded in a lot of the German expressionist works. If you look at the works of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, the naked women featured in his prints are not remotely sexual or sexy. Their harshly rendered bodies are contorted and posed in incredibly "unflattering" poses. I guess I had been so stuck in figuring out exactly "what I was trying to say with this void" that I didn't think much about the effects I was employing to change the reading of my ordinarily sexualized body.

I was checking out some photos on a friends facebook page, He's in Paris and I guess he went to some show (he didn't say who the artist was)and took a few pictures of the work. This one really struck me and seemed to be employing the same kinds of visual elements to chance the reading of the female body:

I love how much the animal head throws off the reading of this woman's naked body.