Alex B. and la petite mort

You may have seen the photo session preview on this blog, here are more photographs from my photo session with 49-year-old Italian-born model and mother of one, Alex B.

Alex is a life model, posing for artists to draw, sketch, paint, sculpt, etc., “from life”. I had worked with her once before. With this photo session, I wanted to take first steps towards a new idea and needed to work with somebody, whom I already knew, liked and trusted.

The photographs are the beginning of an investigation into the process behind passion and lust, culminating in that wonderful moment of la petite mort, the orgasm.

I was not so much interested in the workings of the body but what I could see in her face. Neither of us had done anything like it before. I do not normally suffer from bourgeois inhibitions and yet I find it strangely difficult to tell a model “(pretend to) masturbate for me because I want to see your face when you have an orgasm, and make it really expressive”. It is perhaps the need to be understood correctly and the fear of wrecked reputations.

Especially for a photographer, introducing the idea is a difficult and awkward balancing act between taste and smut, fun and exploitation, art and pornography.

Photography is always much quicker accused of pornography than any other medium. I was watching Antiques Roadshow the other day. A member of the audience had brought paintings dating from around the 1940s or early 50s. One painting was a portrait of a topless young girl aged 14. The antiques expert revelled in the beauty of the painting and yet, it was the portrait of a girl training to be a ballet dancer. The partial nudity added nothing to the concept of the painting. Had it been a photograph of a topless 14-year old girl, it would have never been allowed on the programme and the member of the audience would have been accused of owning child pornography.

On the topic of age, Alex is 49. In our society – or perhaps it is just the media – beauty, sex and passion all seem to have the youth tag attached. This is odd because society at large is getting older, people live longer and stay young longer, so there is no reason to exclude a more mature population from the concept of eroticism. Just because a body has a few signs of wear and tear does not mean that it cannot be beautiful and desirable.

Some of the photographs in the below slide show contain of course nudity and are intended for an adult audience only.

In our extremely image conscious world, authenticity does not matter all that much, as long as the image is right. With this in mind, it is interesting to consider whether Alex’s pleasure was real or pretended.

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