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Is everybody naked a friend?
May. 7th, 2007 03:32 pmSpencer Tunick's latest mass photography project -- in which about 20,000 people stood naked together in Mexico City's Zocala -- reveals very few body parts. What it does bring home, though, is that mass nudity on that scale is above all a colour. A kind of orangey pink colour, in fact. It makes a refreshing change from the dark metallic colours of jeans, suits and jackets that citizens tend to wear. Pink is a vulnerable, feminine and humane colour. When I'm pink, I'm taking my armour off (even if I show my weapon).
In yesterday's New York Times A Young Man with an Eye, and Friends Up a Tree -- photographer Ryan McGinley -- described his first, nerve-wracking assignment. In 2000 Ryan was sent to Berlin to photograph me at the Intercontinental Hotel for an Index magazine story.
“I was so nervous,” recalled Mr. McGinley, who was only 21 at the time. “It was the first time I had to take photographs of someone I didn’t know, and it was scary trying to make it look like pictures of my friends. First I asked if he would take his shirt off, and then if his girlfriend would take off her clothes down to her underwear.”
"They did," reports the Times. Well, of course we did! We also pretended to pee for Ryan, who'd filled shutter release bulbs with water and wanted us to seem to be "peeing" from them. (In the published photos only Shizu is peeing, perched decorously on the toilet.) I guess this was Ryan's way to make us look like his friends. Only friends -- really close ones -- tend to watch each other pee, or get naked together. Well, traditionally, anyway. Now, anyone does it. I'm naked with strangers of all sexes every time I go to my local Berlin sauna.
On Ryan's website all the portraits are naked. Since these are all attractive young people, it makes for visual pleasure, a hedonistic atmosphere, and a pleasing aesthetic unity. But making celebrities look like friends by making them naked underlines something problematical; Ryan comes from a school of photography influenced by Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, and there's a certain rockist grit built into it. These are real people, the photos seem to proclaim, engaged in acts of real intimacy, sometimes acts which are defiantly illegal (drug-taking, sex with minors) and life-threatening (many of Goldin's sitters are bruised, or have drug-dilated eyes). So what happens when you give that look to people who just have a new book or a new record to promote, people who aren't really your close friends? Doesn't nakedness then become just another suit of clothes?
Personally, I like Ryan's pictures. I'm not really worried by the rockist question of whether everybody naked is really a friend. I think he's given this decade one of its basic looks. It's a pink look, an informal look. And yes, as in Spencer Tunick's pictures nakedness -- supposedly personal and intimate -- tends to blur in Ryan's pictures into an impersonal mush of pinkness.
If it's not always pink, it's certainly gay. We can see the same look in the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, whose bed I had the honour to grace last year. It's where "modern Paul" (he's the black bespectacled man in the Nervous Heartbeat video) takes most of his portraits. So you meet Paul, and within minutes you're sitting on his unmade bed, upstairs in his tiny bedroom.
Actually, my Paul Mpagi Sepuya portrait was fully-clothed when it ran in Currency. But there were three naked men on the cover getting super-friendly. The picture was in black and white, but a certain pinkness shone through. It's more a way of life than a colour. Is everybody naked a friend? Well, not necessarily. But it ups your chances.
In yesterday's New York Times A Young Man with an Eye, and Friends Up a Tree -- photographer Ryan McGinley -- described his first, nerve-wracking assignment. In 2000 Ryan was sent to Berlin to photograph me at the Intercontinental Hotel for an Index magazine story.
“I was so nervous,” recalled Mr. McGinley, who was only 21 at the time. “It was the first time I had to take photographs of someone I didn’t know, and it was scary trying to make it look like pictures of my friends. First I asked if he would take his shirt off, and then if his girlfriend would take off her clothes down to her underwear.”
"They did," reports the Times. Well, of course we did! We also pretended to pee for Ryan, who'd filled shutter release bulbs with water and wanted us to seem to be "peeing" from them. (In the published photos only Shizu is peeing, perched decorously on the toilet.) I guess this was Ryan's way to make us look like his friends. Only friends -- really close ones -- tend to watch each other pee, or get naked together. Well, traditionally, anyway. Now, anyone does it. I'm naked with strangers of all sexes every time I go to my local Berlin sauna.
On Ryan's website all the portraits are naked. Since these are all attractive young people, it makes for visual pleasure, a hedonistic atmosphere, and a pleasing aesthetic unity. But making celebrities look like friends by making them naked underlines something problematical; Ryan comes from a school of photography influenced by Larry Clark and Nan Goldin, and there's a certain rockist grit built into it. These are real people, the photos seem to proclaim, engaged in acts of real intimacy, sometimes acts which are defiantly illegal (drug-taking, sex with minors) and life-threatening (many of Goldin's sitters are bruised, or have drug-dilated eyes). So what happens when you give that look to people who just have a new book or a new record to promote, people who aren't really your close friends? Doesn't nakedness then become just another suit of clothes?
Personally, I like Ryan's pictures. I'm not really worried by the rockist question of whether everybody naked is really a friend. I think he's given this decade one of its basic looks. It's a pink look, an informal look. And yes, as in Spencer Tunick's pictures nakedness -- supposedly personal and intimate -- tends to blur in Ryan's pictures into an impersonal mush of pinkness.
If it's not always pink, it's certainly gay. We can see the same look in the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, whose bed I had the honour to grace last year. It's where "modern Paul" (he's the black bespectacled man in the Nervous Heartbeat video) takes most of his portraits. So you meet Paul, and within minutes you're sitting on his unmade bed, upstairs in his tiny bedroom.
Actually, my Paul Mpagi Sepuya portrait was fully-clothed when it ran in Currency. But there were three naked men on the cover getting super-friendly. The picture was in black and white, but a certain pinkness shone through. It's more a way of life than a colour. Is everybody naked a friend? Well, not necessarily. But it ups your chances.