On a (hopefully brief) hiatus right now. Please check back later in the year.

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My current project is entitled "Photographic Dialogues: On Beauty, the Body, and the Photographic Process."

This project is an ongoing meditation on the concepts and motivations at play in boudoir and art nude photography. It will ask questions about how photographer and model understand their roles; the motivations behind their work; what “beauty” means in the context of these genres of photography; and what is involved in capturing and viewing that beauty.

Each shoot will occur during the course of a dialogue between model and photographer using the questions below as a guide and as prompts for poses. The photographer will take notes on the model’s and photographer’s answers. To help ground this project as an attempt at honesty and introspection, the photographer will use B&W film during the shoot to minimize the desire for post-production manipulation, and to ensure a physical product (i.e. the negative and any resulting darkroom prints) is created. The results will then be curated and presented as a photo-dialogue.

1. What makes a pose beautiful?
2. What role does context and environment play in a beautiful pose?
3. Is there a categorical difference between headless nudes or nude body parts and fully incorporated nudes? Does the model believe the viewer should respond differently?
4. What does the lens represent to the model? Is it a creative partner, an envisioned audience, an accidental witness, or something else?
5. Is the photographer “outside” of the beauty created by the model as an objective scribe or recorder, or, perhaps a voyeur? Or is the photographer “inside” the beauty as an involved collaborator, artistic director, or perhaps even a provocateur?
6. If “inside,” what are the model’s expectations of the photographer?
7. If there were technical means to do so, such as adding gallery labels to the pictures, would the model prefer it if viewers somehow understood more about the model &/or her individual poses?

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