~hughesa

Dudes. I love a nude as much as the next guy, but browsing the people and portraits has become a task that involves wading through great heaps of pornographic crap. Don't get me wrong: porn can be pretty cool. But I want to see _good_ photography.

Perhaps it is easy to confuse pornographic and artistic nudes... Lord knows, it is hard to cook up a theoretical explanation of the difference between the two kinds of nude. But then again nearly any interesting difference is hard to explicitly account for. But I think that it is especially easy to confuse pornographic and non-pornographic nude photography.

This is for the simple reason that the fundamental response by which I identify a good photograph is this: Does it make me think "wow"? Does it fill me with awed pleasure?

As it happens, naked people sometimes (OK... quite often) fill me with awed pleasure and so it will happen that pictures of naked people will fill me with awed pleasure. But, such pictures will succeed in filling me with awed pleasure largely independently of their value as art. Perhaps some photographers suffer from this problem, as well, and mistake their pictures of naked people with art.

It is too bad that people are about the most interesting subjects for photographic representation... If I were to seriously pursue art photography, I'd consider _not_ photographing people (especially naked people) so as to avoid suffering from the illusion that what I have produced is art, when it is really pornography. ...which is too bad, b/c artistic nudes really are a wonderful form of art...

but... jeeze... wide angle shots of naked girls, standing on their tip-toes among colored rocks, waving scarfs in the air... This is supposed to be art?!