Erotic art takes on a different tone as the absence of personality focuses one’s attention

Here we are already in February and I have yet to shoot a new frame with my camera. Yes, I’ve taken some snapshots with my phone, but I consider them more pedestrian, capturing a moment for memory or a concept for later development. In previous years, I’d be chomping at the bit to shoot but this year is different. First, I came into the new year with a four-week backlog of images. That hasn’t happened before and, to be honest, it was a relief as I didn’t have to try and create content at a time of the year when no one seems in the mood to shoot.

Just as important, though, without having new images to parse and process, I’ve had time to experiment, try new techniques and throw away what I didn’t like, keeping what I did, and then trying something different again. This week’s images are the result of that experimentation. When I was creating a header image for the front page of this website, I developed a composite process that I found interesting and immediately wanted to explore more. This is the kind of maybe-it-will-maybe-it-won’t experimentation that I’m reluctant to impose on a new set of images. Archived photos that were previously undeveloped are more appropriate.

However, working with archived images can present a problem as people who posed two or three years ago aren’t exactly expecting pictures of them to come popping up on the internet this morning. My resolution to that issue was to keep everything anonymous. Anonymous work doesn’t always play as well as we’d like but in this instance, it is perfect as the concept would be diminished by a full image with an individual personality.

What you see below are the ones that survived. I learned a lot about where this particular set of processes works and where it doesn’t. This needs to be a carefully selected group of photos where focus can be limited to a specific portion of the photograph, the not content of the entire image. Even with that focus, not everything worked. It’s also worth mentioning that this process takes about five times the effort of a normal photograph. A good day was finishing two images.

Be aware that I ramped up the eroticism on this set. That’s partly because it serves the concept well and partly because we’ve been a bit soft on that portion of the genre the past couple of years. My goal is to be less reticent in displaying what is real and genuinely beautiful in its own right. Still, this is NSFW and I would think twice before viewing them with children in the room.

As always, click on any of the thumbnails below to view the full set.

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