Over this past winter, entering my eighth year of shooting figurative art, I began to see a body of work taking shape. Importantly, a body of work that I am proud to share with anyone who will slow down long enough to look! And now the question: what do I do with it?
As the recent Insta meme shouted, nude art is not porn. It certainly can be sexy, even HOT, but while I would be foolish to say that there's not an eroticism to my work, it is definitely not porny. Some of it may not be the first thing I would share with a minor but simple nudity should be more easily understood than many bikini-clad advertising tropes that ARE shoved at children.
One useful exercise recently has been to cull sets of images for publication. But what publications? This site might be an option. Stephen Wong's Images of Nude magazine in Australia is another. There are a multitude of "pay to play" online publications that will suck in whatever content you send and return automated acceptance and upsell emails. Those don't feel all that great.
I have shown pieces in local gallery shows but despite a lot of favorable response, this sort of work is very unlikely to sell (but a lesbian bookstore bought a piece at my first show!). I totally understand. I might hang an interesting portrait of my wife or girlfriend on a wall but a stranger in some intimate expression? Seems like a weird dorm-room feel. A lot of my work has revolved around getting past the usual pose orientation of a model to achieve something more personal. More portrait than pose, unguarded. As I type, one of my favorite shots hangs to my left. Hailey hovers off-balance on a low footstool in a meadow, legs tensed but arms languidly awaiting her body taking flight of some kind. She's caught between moments and could be summoned into the air as easily as falling to earth. For a long time this whole shoot was something that I returned to over and over without being able to share. I finally printed this and began seeing an arc of images that evokes a story or at least stirs the imagination. What do I do with them now?
I have struggled with the idea of admitting professionalism and hanging out a shingle. I can imagine a Neo-boudoir practice where upscale women would find this rewarding. I'm very confident in my ability to walk into any situation or setting and come away with solid images. Hotel room? Got it. Meadow? No problem. Deep forest or a kitchen? Been there. I'm perhaps more worried about the ramifications of doing this commercially. Will it still be fun? Will my clients LIKE it? Honestly, it takes me a bit of time to SEE each shoot. I find it hard to edit at my best immediately. I knew I loved this shoot with Hailey in the moment and there were images that were great right out of the gate but it's been YEARS of revisiting it to really feel like I am getting something deeper out of it. Maybe I'm not ready to do really good commercial work?
Like niche print-on-demand magazines, social media offers little exposure any more. The changes in hashtags that reward large accounts, the ongoing war against art…I have built a tidy little community of models and photographers but social media is hardly the grand reach to a public that would advertise my abilities. I feel surrounded by walls. I can adorn them with art but only I can see or appreciate it.