Here's an article, which like the PDN piece, was cited by Colberg: The Twisted World of Cult Photographer Nobuyoshi Araki which I think argues that "smut cannot be simply recontextualized and turned in to not smut."
I think it's an interesting alternate take worth a read.
It's also a fascinating illustration of Colberg's, um, intellectual flexibility. It is also worth noting that Lone Wolf publishes a certain small amount of nude photography. Of women, by women, natch.
Whose smut is it anyway? The viewer’s, the artst’s, the model’s?
ReplyDeleteAnd yet there are plenty of people who honestly enjoy BDSM. Is pain contextual? There is the pain of someone being tortured in prison and then there's the pain of someone who is consenting to a non-traditional sexual experience.
ReplyDeleteIt's complicated. At least one artist in the same line as Araki (an artist who was quite bad at rope work and at best mediocre at photography) more or less famously photographed one of his models while she was ODing, and there's some question about whether she had already died in one of his photos.
DeleteThis is close to the worst possible contextualization of a photo, but the pictures themselves are mild as milk compared with Araki's pictures.