Quite an interesting debate!
Frustrated with what is offered online [misconsideration of erotic & softcore photography] I have recently attempted to shoot myself… Unfortunatly out of North America and Eastern Europe finding models for nude photography is hard, and in a country like France especially you face a lot of “barriers” …
What first shocked me when looking on amateur modeling sites were the hypocrit talks (both photographers and models hiding systematically beind that artistic cover to deal with nudity and rejecting pornography and “x” kind of photography) and how things were codified (artistic nude means posing so that you hide the most intimate spot, whereas erotic kind of photos would mean posing so that the intimate spot is well revealed). This makes no sense! Photography is an art (all photographs have an artistic component whatever you shoot a naked women or a bobcat into the wild), and erotism is more about the sex arousal and tease, the way you come to nudity and show it (introducing a glam side to it)… The degree of nudity is an all different matter and gets nothing to do with those terms (often misused for me…).
Where they are wrong as well is that PORNOGRAPHY (which is that bad, that you should never mention that word!!!) concerns actually ALL FORMS of NUDITY. You must distinguish SOFTCORE and HARDCORE (which are very different) but both of them are PORN. As long as there is nudity, it is PORN according to the law. And here again peoples are often confused with the definition of these terms which get nothing to do with the degree of nudity or the number of model represented! BY OPPOSITION to HARDCORE, SOFTCORE MEANS NO ACTION or NO REPRESENTATION OF SEXUAL ACTS!! Therefore, being linked to the POSE (of a model more or less naked in that case), photography is better suited to softcore rather than hardcore (a one moment capture of action makes less sense…).
Because of all these confusions, SOFTCORE PHOTOS are really misconsidered; what we get on Photos, is either good softcore tease of NO-NUDE models or explicite sex of pornstars (see the GLAMCORE fashion for instance of solo glam models going bad – ie masturbating- associated to SOFTCORE!!!… ATK, Twistys, 1byday, Nubiles…are the specialists…). Little understands SOFTCORE and NUDE PHOTOGRAPHY showing a good erotic sense. What voyeurs wanna see is a lovely model exhibiting her attributes without hands on the way in a well worked out (graphical) setting (background, light/colors, outfit/lingery, shooting angles, thematic etc…) which would make the work more artistic.
But defining ART is actually way trickier and subjective compared to PORN. Anyway, I think that it’s easier to associate Art to Softcore rather than Hardcore… My every day observation shows that most people don’t understand both words (ART/PORN) or misused them to their own advantages.
Chris
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