Beauty, Eroticism and Sex in Art and Life
I've been thinking about two films off late. Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and Passolini's Salo, 120 days of Sodom.
The first left me with a kind of fear that went down deep in my navel. There is a blood chilling scene where Huppert crushes glass and puts it in the coat pocket of her student in the hopes that she would injure her hands and not be able to perform. It was ot so cold -that scene - worse to me than the end when she goes into the theatre with a knife, to kill the student, but stabs herself ultimately.
And of course the perverse relationship she was having with another young student whom she started stalking eventually.
I'm not sure anyone but Huppert could have pulled it off. On one hand, there is a perverseness in the film _ a sexual perversion, but even deeper that is the psychology of Huppert. The tension between sinful desire and vile hatred is so blurred. It's something you could write a whole thesis on it.
The second film that left me terrified was Pasolini's Salo. It took me three days to finish watching it. The grotesqueness of the sexuality in the film was just too much for me- and yet, what a brilliantly made film- and perhaps the debauchery insisted something deep inside me, to keep watching.
I think we all have this hidden perverseness in us that we don’t show.
I talk about both these films because they toy with the inner eroticism of the viewer. You know it’s vile, you want to turn the screen off, yet you can't help watching it. I believe we all have which, we hide under our genteelness.
Why am I even bringing this up? I feel its somehow connected to the photography I've been doing lately especially the Portrait of a Man - where on young boy asked me to take boudoir photographs of him. At one point of our shoot, he really wanted a female partner, which would have saved me a lot of grief and imagination as to what to do with him but we couldn't find one whom we didn't have to pay. What made this boy want these Images? I think about this a lot because boudoir photography has always fascinated me— in the sense that i am fascinated by the subjects who feel the need to have these pictures taken of them.
Perhaps, there is some perverseness in Containment Diaries too (the recent ones in particular) but The Diaries is along term document about transition and coping with living with illness. It's not a simple boudoir photograph that you take in one day that looks nice and erotic and you take them home.
There's really nothing deeper portrait photography unless you follow your subject for a minimum amount of time (which differs from photographer to photographer and on experience). That’s when the real magic happens—with me at least. To bring that inner person out.
There is a photographer,
who has been photographing his fifty years of living with his wife in a series called ‘The Marriage Bed’ and it's staggeringly good.I’ve always wanted to do something like that with M. But M, who hates cameras and has allowed only one person to take his portrait - Jean Pagliuso- who photographs all the celebrities for Vogue and the other glossies. It was such a stunning portrait of M when he was in his twenties.
For over a year now, I have begged M to let me photograph him and he always said no. Being a filmmaker himself he is very finely attuned to the aesthetics of things.
But some thing turned between us the last few days- l think it was the way I was talking about my soon to be Bodies Project (where l will be photographing the relationship between older women and their bodies) and the way I was begging him for ideas about The Portrait of a Man.
I recall one day, while doing these boudoir portraits, I was,simply out of ideas- how do I photograph, in a meaningful way - a) someone I barely know and b) a man's body which I have no aesthetic interest in •
All these are a kind of perverseness while I want to immerse myself in a project that’s more human. I found on eighty year old lady for my Bodies project and I'm just dreaming of photographing her hands. To me that is intimate, beautiful, intense and even slightly sexual. (At least the way I picture it happening in my mind). Just one wrinkled hand, resting onto a table with a while table cloth. It must have so many stories in them- I'm so excited to photograph her, l asked if coulda separate long project just with her.
What are the lines between perverseness, eroticism and beauty ? And I loath artists and filmmakers who bringout this inner perverseness in me.
Like Reading Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of a Stepmother, where a newly wed woman seduces her prepubescent stepson - or is it he who is seducing her? The reader never finds out.
Whatever it is, I strangely wanted something to happen between the two end almost flushed in guilt for feeling that way. Lolita as well.
I end this with two sets of images. One- self portraits of myself I’ve taken over six or seven years now, and two- a few from The Portrait of A Man, which we did in two days. Can you tell the difference in the two portrait series?
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