For all photo sessions, for which I receive a firm booking by Monday, 14 June 2010, 13:00 (that’s 1 p.m.), I am offering an extra free print on exhibition quality paper in A3 size, worth £48. This is the time by which I need to receive your booking. Photo sessions can be taken later. You must be a ripe 35 years or older to qualify.

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It is quite a mystery. If you search for portrait photographer on google.co.uk., you will find me on page one of a total of nearly three million search results and on page two for photographer, out of a total of 82 million results. I am not, however, so well placed for the search term mature nudes, so all this traffic originating from this search term is strange.

Lesley, 47

One possibility is that mature represents a fetish, a fantasy or a kink, although this particular penchant seems to sit around in a niche, twiddling its thumbs and waiting for the masses to discover it. The Google UK search engine finds only about 2.4 million search results for mature nudes, not a huge number in the wider context of the Internet.

There is another explanation: Around 80% of my clients are private clients. Of those, just under half come to me for lingerie or nude portraits, roughly the same number men and women and, increasingly, couples. Many of them are at an age that may be considered mature.

Alex B., 49

Writing this, I realise that I am struggling to make sense of my thoughts because the concept of beauty and age is riddled with inconsistencies and contradictions.

There is no doubt that we grow older later in life. When I was a child, people in their twenties could be considered young at a stretch, especially if they had long hair and donned a pair of jeans. People in their thirties were seriously grown up. Forties was statically past it. Fifties definitely old bordering on the derelict and many people promptly died upon reaching their retirement in their sixties. Live to the age of 75 and the local mayor would hand-deliver a bouquet of flowers for your birthday. Any older than that and you were a miracle.

Conversely and surely strangely, maturity happened around 45 whilst today it seems to have crept to a mere 30 years of age without anybody noticing what was happening and pointing out to maturity that it was heading the wrong way.

Today, we expect (and are expected) to live long in relative health, fitness and happiness. We expect to have a fulfilled life at an age when our grandparents were putting money aside for their funerals. Shame, though, that my generation won’t have the money to finance their golden years.

The term mature is in itself problematic. Whilst there is nothing wrong with it per se – on the contrary, who would not want to be experienced and as wise as a Buddhist monk? – it becomes laden with pre-conceptions and is almost derogatory when used as in “mature women” because it implies that the passing of time erodes beauty and desirability.

The problem is considerably worse for women than for men because it is women who are expected to compete with teenagers for beauty and desirability, driven by a sense of despair and alienation, which is kindled by magazines and advertising.

Akemi, 51

It is this pressure to conform to arbitrary and limiting classification standards, which creates the self-imposed expectations, which are always bound to disappoint. I believe that photography has a duty to examine such conflicts in society.

I dispute that the passing of time erodes beauty and desirability. My work in portrait photography centres on the individual and not their looks. I want to find and express the person in my photographs. I really do believe that attractiveness comes from the inside and has nothing to do whatsoever with looks. I call it inner beauty and age has nothing to do with it.

You can see some of my work with mature nudes in the nudes photography portfolio and in these blog posts:

• The very popular Alex B.
• A celebration of the mature body
• A portfolio for two life models
• Alex B. and la petite mort
• Lesley

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Alex started her modelling career as a life model, posing for artists to draw, paint and sculpt “from life”.

As a photographic model, Alex is a pleasure to work with, reliable, professional and intuitive. Below are some of my favourite photographs of my two photo sessions with her.

You can see more of Alex in these two posts on my blog:

Alex B. and la petite mort
Photo session preview Alex B.

One motto, which is important in my work, is that everybody is beautiful, it just depends on how you look at them. The photographs in this series demonstrate, I believe, that the older, more mature body can still be beautiful and desirable.

We cannot detach a body from its owner’s individuality. The combination of areas of almost virgin perfection combined with those of wear are attractive evidence of the body’s owner’s life experiences.

See more photography in my portfolio.

To book your own photo session, please visit the services section on my website.

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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.

See more of Alex B.

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