Ellie Mae

I want to talk a little about this image. It's old stuff of Corinne and has shown in quite a few places. Well, more then a few but less then a lot? Anyway, it�s been one of my better-accepted images.

One reason people seem to like it is the primal sex appeal of the picture. I knew what I was doing when I posed it, trying to make it look seductive, yet ferule, but I certainly didn�t think many people would find it sexy. But they do, both women and men have commented at length about it.

The poise... lines of the legs... the ferule and tangled hair... and lets not forget the grittiness of the image itself, which adds a lot of texture to it.

Then throw in the fact that she kind of looks messed up, not in a good situation. There is bare and sundered wood about her, darkness and gloom behind her, even her fingernails are unkempt. Nothing about the scene is pretty yet you can obviously say she�s a beautiful girl. So that adds a sense of emotional danger in making the assessment that it�s a sexy image. It shouldn�t be sexy, logically, but it is, emotionally.

I like that.

I bring it up because on the way home from Roma tonight (mmm, tea), where Richard and I had a great conversation about art and photography, I had a couple images burst in my head (That�s how I get inspiration for a lot of my engineered images, flashes of imagery) of a beautiful girl in a terrible place, looking alluring. I enjoy the contrast.

Now, I�m not talking nudity, or anything, anyone who knows me would know better then that, but I�m talking the threat of it. Using classic techniques used by the original form study artists in showing hardly anything but enticing the imagination to do the rest.

Mmm.. contrast.. liking something you know you shouldn�t like. Being attracted to something that shouldn�t be attractive. Eye candy for the ID, if you will. I�m excited about it. I want to play with it, see what I can come up with.

Thinking about this with a specific model, as well. I�m going to have to shoot her a couple times before I can feel comfortable trying to go for something that could be pretty hard to capture, but if she is relaxed and can have fun with it, she�ll be perfect. She�s never been photographed before so it�ll take a little time for us to click well together, assuming she�s up for it.

Eh, anyway, I�m just kicking around the thought. It�s supposed to be cloudy this weekend so I�m going to shoot, god damnit. The weekend after this one, I hope to go to either Victorville or up to Pioche and do some of my still life stuff (Since it�s exceedingly hard to get a model to travel 4-5 hours and stay at a location overnight hehehe, it�s not like I can pay these people, I�m poor!).

Despair, beauty, filth, and sex. Yeah, I like.

-G