The female form is ubiquitous and unsurprising. Its contours are well known. They are visible everyday in various contexts. This standardisation and pervasive presence does not mean that the female form is not fascinating to men and women. Its fascination endures in spite of the sheer rain of female presences in every society. The female form is like a drink that people never tire of imbibing. It is represented endlessly in various media. It is foregrounded even in the strict Islamic decorum in which women cover the entire body in black cloth with only the eyes showing. Such total covering, demonstrating an absolute determination to control visual and ultimately mental and physical access to women, suggests that something unique, perhaps even perilous, is being covered by those lines of impenetrable black.
This form so resolutely hidden in some religious contexts is on full display in many places places all over the world, as in the presence of naked mannequins modelling female underwear in shop windows in streets where children pass on their way to school. We have all become inured to the use of the female body as a means of advertising. It is rare to watch a US feature film without some degree of male and female nakedness.
In spite of this shaping of the visual landscape by the female form in various states of dress and undress, people remain fascinated by that form, even though its general features are identical in all examples.
One artist of what I would describe as female presence is photographer Helmut Newton. Newton's art goes beyond the representation of the female form to constructing female presence. Presence, because his compositions are less efforts to simply depict women than attempts to bring alive in a manner that is unique in each instance, what can be understood as the shock of recognition of the distinctiveness constituted by a particular configuration of the human species, a configuration whose uniqueness is expressed primarily in terms of the body.
There is little that is new in nakedness but a broad, perhaps infinite range of variations can be created out of various stages of relationship between nakedness and near nakedness, between nakedness and being fully clothed, between nakedness and the forms of things that are not human, correlations that make the human more distinctive and make nakedness no longer familiar.
Clothes are often fashioned to talk and not simply to act as covering for the human being. The eloquence of clothes as a capsule for the human being, advertising the sheer dexterity of the person, showcasing human physical flexibility and aliveness, is strikingly brought alive by Helmut Newton.
Through Newton's eyes we see the glory of the physical grounding of human existence. Everything that humans are capable of is achieved through the body. The body will age but, as described by the philosopher Demas Nwoko, that ageing is part of its beauty.
Are we not all to some degree voyeurs of the body of the sex we are attracted to?
As for Newton, I did not post a broader selection because the others dealt with nakedness. Even then,they demonstrate the power of nakedness as evocative of the fundamentals of human being, as suggested by the expression one's 'birthday suit', indicating one's naked body. A beautiful expression of the fact that one came into the world naked and actually leaves it naked, anything else being actually a disguise.
This understanding of nakedness, which may be seen as resonating in some of Newton's nudes in public spaces, evokes for me the nakedness of the 'traveller in space', the Tibetan dakini or the Baudlerian and Benjaminian flaneur, in the Newton context understood as in motion within the urban landscape, like the delightful creature whose back we see in the picture above as she strides into the metropolis.
What do we encounter through the eyes of this figure in motion through streets, homes, boardrooms, bordellos, her calves terminating in the black terminal conches of the exquisitely stilettoed heel in the other picture, of the kind that sent Hamidou Kane's traveller to Paris from Senegal in the early days of empire into shock on witnessing for the first time the absence of a naked foot in a space occupied by that creature who ' rests on one foot and then on the other in order to move forward' as described in Ambiguous Adventure, ambiguous in being both revelatory and unsettling, as perhaps evoked by the the creation of beauty through incongruity that seems to be Newton's forte?
Some of Newton's art has been described as politically incorrect. This is an accurate description of some of his compositions, like those in which undertones of subjugation and violence are fundamental aspects of its beauty.
Must politically incorrect art necessarily feeding negative attitudes?
True, one sees some Newton images of women as the focus of the gaze of men in terms that do not suggest tenderness. I see that as part of the imaginative world we may inhabit without necessarily enacting. His art has also been described as showing women in terms of dominating men, as described by a reviewer on the Amazon.com site of The Best of Helmut Newton. He was active from his 20s I think, into old age, so I expect he tried different themes, perspectives etc.
I am becoming curious about the scope of portrayals of women in Newton's work. What is the level of power accorded to women and men in his work? What may these compositions suggest about both the creative and destructive aspects of human possibilities? Can this be related to the creativity/destructive polarity evoked by conceptions of relationships between the body, consciousness and power in Western, Asian and African understandings of the feminine as indicated by the history of witchcraft in the West, of related conceptions in other cultures such as the aje of the Yoruba, the azen of the Bini, the dakini of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dakini Daemonicon of English artist/magician Mark Dunn's adaptation of this Tantric conception (www.dakini-daemonicon.com)?
Examples of the master's work:
1. http://community.livejourn
2.http://user.tninet.se/~ryk
As for Newton, I did not post a broader selection because the others dealt with nakedness. Even then,they demonstrate the power of nakedness as evocative of the fundamentals of human being, as suggested by the expression one's 'birthday suit', indicating one's naked body. A beautiful expression of the fact that one came into the world naked and actually leaves it naked, anything else being actually a disguise.
This understanding of nakedness, which may be seen as resonating in some of Newton's nudes in public spaces, evokes for me the nakedness of the 'traveller in space', the Tibetan dakini or the Baudlerian and Benjaminian flaneur, in the Newton context understood as in motion within the urban landscape, like the delightful creature whose back we see in the picture above as she strides into the metropolis.
What do we encounter through the eyes of this figure in motion through streets, homes, boardrooms, bordellos, her calves terminating in the black terminal conches of the exquisitely stilettoed heel in the other picture, of the kind that sent Hamidou Kane's traveller to Paris from Senegal in the early days of empire into shock on witnessing for the first time the absence of a naked foot in a space occupied by that creature who ' rests on one foot and then on the other in order to move forward' as described in Ambiguous Adventure, ambiguous in being both revelatory and unsettling, as perhaps evoked by the the creation of beauty through incongruity that seems to be Newton's forte?
Some of Newton's art has been described as politically incorrect. This is an accurate description of some of his compositions, like those in which undertones of subjugation and violence are fundamental aspects of its beauty.
Some of Newton's art has been described as politically incorrect. This is an accurate description of some of his compositions, like those in which undertones of subjugation and violence are fundamental aspects of its beauty.
Must politically incorrect art necessarily feeding negative attitudes?
True, one sees some Newton images of women as the focus of the gaze of men in terms that do not suggest tenderness. I see that as part of the imaginative world we may inhabit without necessarily enacting. His art has also been described as showing women in terms of dominating men, as described by a reviewer on the Amazon.com site of The Best of Helmut Newton. He was active from his 20s I think, into old age, so I expect he tried different themes, perspectives etc.
I am becoming curious about the scope of portrayals of women in Newton's work. What is the level of power accorded to women and men in his work? What may these compositions suggest about both the creative and destructive aspects of human possibilities? Can this be related to the creativity/destructive polarity evoked by conceptions of relationships between the body, consciousness and power in Western, Asian and African understandings of the feminine as indicated by the history of witchcraft in the West, of related conceptions in other cultures such as the aje of the Yoruba, the azen of the Bini, the dakini of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dakini Daemonicon of English artist/magician Mark Dunn's adaptation of this Tantric conception (www.dakini-daemonicon.com)?
Examples of the master's work:
1. http://community.livejourn
2.http://user.tninet.se/~ryk
Examples of the master's work:
1. http://community.livejournal.com/ruguru/677468.html
2.http://user.tninet.se/~ryk484d/newton/newton.htm
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