Anonymous donors
These images interested me in that the facial features have been crudely disguised using graphics software. The effects are somewhat painterly in the tradition of Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Willem De Kooning et al. The images appear as un/welcome online gifts to casual screen voyeurs.
In acknowledging that these images may be read from various theoretical perspectives, and I’ll throw in Structuralist, Freudian and Feminist critique, all of which may readily apply. However, my concern is primarily with the visual and in suggesting a distinct photographic genre phenomenon which articulates its own value systems and identity narratives.
Problematic questions of exploitation, objectification and sexual power relations are raised whenever the female form is presented in another reprographic medium, it is also worth noting that the issues long existed in the history of painting. Matisse’s Odalisques, along with many examples from the art historical canon can be seen not only to celebrate the nude, but also as male subjugation of the female form.
I‘m not sure if color photography was available to Matisse , but some of the bald men in the photograph bear a keen resemblance to the French artist suggesting intriguing kismet…Monsier Matisse reincarnated as his own odalisque.
The amateur snap-shot aesthetic of the photographs adds authenticity, these are not professional actors, nor the production values of the film, TV and advertising industries. Here we observe a ad hoc D.I.Y. practice. Willing participants (?) play off the thrill of risqué display. To regard these photographs also leads to thoughts of their authorship and provenance, vessels which have already sailed. The imagery which is disseminated through our screens have become on online material resource for a multitude of treatments: It is stuff to use.
These are essentially “laundered” photographs, that is, pictures amended through phases of manipulation, pictures of pictures of pictures. “My” photo is a screen shot, of a reformatted original that has undergone a series of up and downloading, cropping, filtering and manipulation via who knows how many hands, we might even suggest these are blind collaborations in the tradition of the surrealist drawing game “exquisite corpse,” whereby a section of a body is drawn and then concealed by folding, for the next artist to make their addition until a figure is completed. The surprise being to unfold the paper and marvel at the fantastical creature of phoenix wings, webbed feet, hirsute elbows with a six pack and riding a unicycle is revealed.
In addition, the photographs touch on Duchamp’s idea of The Readymade, to paraphrase; to create a new thought for an existing object.
Furthermore, these photographs show a dichotomy of identity in which the individual physically titillates, but simultaneously conceals themselves from recognition by obliterating key facial features. The double life of the anonymous donor.
Perhaps the authors and participants in this image making field have eschewed the insidious body fascism present in our culture in favor of a playfully authentic and democratic endorsement of the vital statistics of what it means to be physically human: Happy swingers unite!