What is art and what is porn ?

[VEChris]

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

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by VEChris

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!

Interesting comment.

Looking at model sites you get a feeling for cultural norms. Girls who like being photographed are more often than not OK with topless or "artistic nudity".

I think there's a considerable difference between sexual content and nudity, lots of people are happy enough to get naked, but aren't going to masturbate for the camera.

But these lines change all the time. While I find everything out of their mouths a bit of brain damage, Lena Dunham and her Girls have moved the line on how many women see sexual content.

[Sirch]

Porn is sexually explicit material. Art is creative expression.
Porn can be art and art can be porn. Some would argue Playboy is porn.
Not because the photographs are pornographic, but because it is intended
to elicit sexual arousal. (Lets not fool ourselves here!) But at the end of the day art is in the eye of the beholder.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Sirch

But at the end of the day art is in the eye of the beholder.

I would say that a distinction can be made: "pure porn" is intended to arouse; there's nothing else. "pure art" is about aesthetics and ideas, not arousal.

That's not in "the eye of the beholder".

EG, no one's got a Pollock stashed in their sock drawer.

Lots of things are "shades of gray" -- with some degree of erotic and aesthetic intent. And how you weight that is "in the eye of the beholder". Greek sculptures are taken to have homoerotic overtones, but whether that's actually what the Greeks thought, looking at them-- that's lost to history.

[VEChris]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Interesting comment.

Looking at model sites you get a feeling for cultural norms. Girls who like being photographed are more often than not OK with topless or "artistic nudity".

I think there's a considerable difference between sexual content and nudity, lots of people are happy enough to get naked, but aren't going to masturbate for the camera.

But these lines change all the time. While I find everything out of their mouths a bit of brain damage, Lena Dunham and her Girls have moved the line on how many women see sexual content.

Sorry for my English and long blabla... I say that in the mind of most models I face, ART is a cover to shoot without sex visible, and this level of explicit nudity (sex visible) is where PORN starts for them (these two words shouldn’t be associated to the “degree” of nudity). While actually I pretend that all photographs are virtually ART and any nudity level is PORN, ie softcore nude, softcore explicit nude and hardcore (but this last category where sexual action is represented is generaly more strictly associated to Porn indeed).

PHOTOGRAPHY (which is an ART) goes ONLY with SOFTCORE (because it means NO ACTION, HARDCORE better fit MOVIE kind of media (…)), but softcore can include any degree of nudity. The step where the model simply POSES with her sex visible (explicit softcore) is difficult to make or get (misconsidered). Softcore has become synonymous of light nude/no nude. It’s like the shy models make excellent teasing but no nude (Onlytease…), and the others make hardcore...., just pure nudes (Met-art) or glamcore (Nubiles, Twistys, ATK…). (…)

To me the over-representation of the artistic component (creativity/originality…) into erotic softcore photographs (especially as far as model’s poses are concerned) may ruin the work (you can work on the thematic, the ambiance, the background, the accessories, the colors etc… but keep the glamorous poses that works the sexy bodies and outfits we like… HEGRE-ART is one website that has gone bad for this reason, it has forgotten that it should be EROTIC first!).

[hamham67]

To me, if someone puts a great deal of thought, time, and effort into a project, then I see it unquestionably, as "art". Whether their project be a comedic short film, a landscape painting, or bottomless shots of a nude model.
Deepsepia is right, pure art and pure porn are two completely different subjects, but that doesn't mean that porn can't be considered artistic. On the other hand, if woman wants to take topless photos of herself and call it art, that's all fine and good, but she would be wrong to deny it as "porn".

Pure porn constitutes subjects with no artistic input; mass produced photos and videos society gave birth to in its video and digital age.

[theequestrian]

Art is an oversized coffee-table book filled with beautiful nude women in exotic locales & photographed in a classy manner.
Porn is the same book with the pages stuck together.

[treehugger]

I'll leave it to St. Bill Hicks to explain.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBvM2YBFrgo

[RoughSleeper]

I have to reply. I've just joined due to the Vintage Photographers and Artists thread as my Father was an erotic artist.

I grew up around both Pornography and Erotic Art in equal measure.
My Father was a real collector. His footage on 8mm reels and stacks of videos were all converted to BETA to assure higher quality.

I saw everything that made the rounds.

It was a HUB of sexuality in all forms, and I found it very confusing as a teenager why he delved into it so much. Then I realised it was because most of it was banned.

Returning from France he once ranted about a Manara comic that had been kept at customs....'..it had a beautiful scene where a woman gets tied to a toilet and her fella shaves her head...'.

I just didn't get it. It sounded like some German Extreme loop.

Years later I saw the comic.
The scene is beautiful, and I understood the difference in my mind between Porn and Art.

Porn is something the viewer has never experienced or investigated, creating an erotic effect, be that positive or negative. Outside of a your own experience, it's all porn.

I do think the immediate access to Porn via the Internet is fucking up generations though. There's a difference between your first sexual experience being a bared ankle or a page of HD teens, milfs and mommies in 5.1 Surround Sound.