[Photo © 2011 Kendra Elliott]
This image by Kendra Elliott perfectly sums up my impression of every strip club I have ever visited, with the possible exception of The Crazy Horse in Paris.
For more strange images of New York nightlife by Kendra, visit her photo blog:
Kendra.Elliott Photo
For some reason I find images of naked women underwater peculiarly erotic. It must be connected to whatever impulse it was that prompted the ancients to imagine that Aphrodite had been born from the foam of the sea, an idea that makes perfect sense to me.
John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, never consummated his marriage, which was annulled after a few years. He said his wife was “not as other women”, physically, and one biographer has speculated that Ruskin was put off by the sight of his wife’s pubic hair. Knowing the female nude only through art, he might never have seen such a thing, and might have thought it was an anomaly. His wife later remarried and had several children, so she must have been “as other women” in most respects.
The convention in most Western art, before the 20th Century, has been to present the female genitalia as a hairless mound of flesh without an orifice. (The ancient Greeks, who found the depiction of female genitalia shocking, usually presented them draped, rather than denatured.)
One major convention in modern fashion photography is to present half-clad women who are almost revealing, threatening to reveal, but not quite revealing their genitalia, or nipples.
The photograph at the head of this post is from the notorious ad campaign for American Apparel, which made a splash by violating this convention. It shows pubic hair, and other American Apparel ads have shown nipples.
I myself find this explicitness refreshing. There’s tease involved — the ads don’t show everything — but they don’t fetishize the naughty bits. Indeed, they celebrate them. They also show women as whole beings, rather than as custodians of desirable but forbidden body parts.
Most fashion photography uses sex to sell clothes. To me, the American Apparel ads use clothes to sell sex, which is often the real point of clothes, and seems a far healthier approach.
Rescuing the female body from commercialization and commodification is one of the great tasks that lie before our civilization. The American Apparel ads can’t be said to contribute much to this task, but perhaps it can be said that they’re a modest step in the right direction.
[Photo © Langdon Clay]
Many years ago, at McNulty's, a bar in Chelsea where I hung out from time to time, back when New York was New York, and people were allowed to smoke in places like this. Bars where you're not allowed to smoke are not really bars — they're theme park attractions where duppies (depressed urban professionals) can pretend that they're hanging out in bars, the sort of establishments they've read about in books or seen in old movies. They're such pathetic creatures, these duppies — God bless them!
Photograph by Langdon Clay.
[Photo © Langdon Clay]
I've got your Christmas for you right here . . .
With thanks to Facebook friend Peter Quincy . . .
Christmas, members only . . .
By Langdon Clay.
Circa 1908.
[Image © Langdon Clay]
The New York night . . .
Christmas, New York, 1908
With thanks to Little Hokum Rag . . .
. . . a modern incarnation. This goddess is an American girl from Alabama on a hunting safari in South Africa.
Click on the image to enlarge.