... I would write about sexuality and here it is.
For the last three months I've tried to take a series of self-portraits with a sexual connotation and I haven't managed to do it. I have not problem to talk about sex with my friends but I've felt quite concern about expressing it in a picture. Certainty, it is not the same telling to a friend how you feel or think about sex than doing it publicly.
What's more, it is a bit more complicated with a photo as you are not actually there to let them know how you feel or think. They have to interpret the image and the reading they can do of it may be different of what you intended to transmit.
Let's use this photo, even it is just a draft, as an example. I used a white background because for me it is the color of pureness and it is associated to positive qualities as honesty or loyalty. In other words, my intention is transmitting to the viewer the idea of what they see is true. It happens that what they find in the photo is my portrait, so the effect I want to create is that whatever I have to say, in this case, to show, is true. This idea is reinforced by the fact that I show myself naked as saying that there is no room for tricks. On top of that, the lighting is quite smooth to avoid harsh shadows. Could an image be more honest?
Well, it depends on what you say, doesn't it? In this case the message is a bit subtle - it wasn't my intention, I wanted to make it quite noticeable ... remember, it is still a draft. It is not about the look-how-sexy-I-am pose, actually, it was a kind of accidental thing that just happened as I wanted to feel the caress on my head. On the contrary, it is about the pinch on the nipple. I wanted to add some tension to the image, make of the pinch the visual centre of the photo, steer the viewer to it and make obvious that my intention was to say that this picture is about sex.
The image doesn't work as it looks like that I'm pretending to seduce the viewer instead of saying that I'm a very sexual person.
In any case, this is the first of a series of three self-portraits. The other ones will be the grey and the black ones but I don't promise I will write about them.
