$35.00
ISBN 0940208326
available through
Amazon
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(09/17/03)
Disclaimer: The fact that Michael Rosen's cover photo features Clean Sheets' own handsome, virile, middle-aged fiction co-editor Bill Noble had absolutely no bearing on this reviewer's impartiality, provided Mr.Noble was described as handsome and virile. Though the cover shot was tastefully cropped just short of Bill's enthusiasm, he stands tall on page 45. Nice angle, Bill. And at your age, too! See Bill's modest account of his personal Rosen shoot in the CS archives: "Is My Ass Artistic?"
Elegant photographs, richly nuanced, exquisitely crafted, vibrantly toned. Unabashed real life lovers of all ages, shapes, and sizes having sex with dignity and spontaneity, tenderness and passion. Hard cocks, eager tongues, hands disappearing up to the wrist, lube and come, vibrators and dildos, collars and tit clamps. (These are a few of our favorite things.) Up till now, volumes combining all of the above were few and far between. But there's a new wave rolling in and distinguished sexuality commentator David Steinberg has caught it and he's hanging 31 (31 sexual photographers including himself, that is).
He doesn't call it erotica. In Steinberg's view, erotica stops short of sex. And he doesn't call it pornography either -- it doesn't conform to consumer expectations; it wasn't shaped by market demand. These are photographs that were made for one reason: the photographers had to make them. This is the vanguard of a new movement, a movement that's reached critical mass. This is people having sex in front of a camera being treated as a fit subject for fine art. Fine art has always explored the nude but shied away from what happens once people get naked.
Photo Sex is a breakthrough testament to a supremely collaborative, supremely liberating art form. Merely viewing these images breaks the twin sexual taboos against watching and allowing ourselves to be watched. Watching breaks down the barriers between orientations, preferences, styles. The current confluence of photographers dedicated to an uncompromising sexual vision assisted by lovers uninhibited by the presence of a lens -- lovers willing to let it all hang out for an audience of strangers -- is a powerful weapon against the neo-Puritan army of anti-pleasure police who control our government and would control our sex lives as well.
Here are our "most tender and intimate depravities," -- as renowned critic A. D. Coleman calls them in his Foreword -- brought into the open. For staid, sedate, sensible sex is hardly sex at all. Steinberg refuses to limit himself to images that every viewer will be comfortable with, but his intent is to celebrate, not to shock. Aiming for beauty, not glamour, aiming to communicate, to validate, to inspire, nothing adult and consensual is alien to him. Why should it be alien to us? But the book is well-balanced between sex with toys, roles, and rituals and the simple joys of physical intimacy. Whatever the mode of pleasure, all the shots share a common exuberance and delight.
Variety is the hallmark of Photo Sex's thrilling gallery of 115 black and white works going back to 1967 from 31 master photographers whose demographics are as varied as their subjects. Steinberg says: "Unlike commercial pornography, the approach of one sexual photographer is as different from the approach of another as Picasso is different from Monet." Particularly striking images (and it's devilishly difficult to single out photos from this extraordinary gallery) include Geoff Manasse's "Gay Tribe I, 23 of 39" with its masked naked men reveling around a bonfire, Ron Raffaelli's "Athletic Passions" picturing a standing man holding a woman against his body in balletic rigor while she grasps his erection, their bodies forming an ideogram of frozen motion, and Steinberg's older couple embracing in bed, eyes closed, mouths wide open with glee.
Here's a simple test for the quality of a photo book: look at the choice of images juxtaposed on facing pages. Turn to pages 30 and 31 of Photo Sex. To the left is Barbara Nitke's "Bathroom Kiss." Wearing only leather wrist cuffs, clutching a roll of toilet paper, a young woman sits naked on the toilet, face upraised in adoration. Clad in fetish lingerie, her female lover bends over her. To the right is Mark I. Chester's "HIV-positive gay jewish deaf leatherman and shaved bottom." As in Nitke's shot, the bottom is naked, the top is fetish-dressed, and the point is neither their genders, nor what they've done in the minutes preceding. The point is the kiss. We all kiss, don't we? (See Clean Sheets' recent review of Nitke's Kiss of Fire,
another groundbreaking volume of sexual photography.)
Pages 38 and 39 juxtapose Paul Johnson's "Titty Kisses" and Paul Dahlquists' "Tit-kiss." Two het couples with not a fetish in sight apply tongues to nips. Each photo makes geometric harmony out of fingers, tongues, and noses. Pages 78 and 79 feature two solo studies by Michael Rosen, Steinberg's highest-volume contributor, comparing unusual masturbation techniques. "Shannon René" has absorbed her entire hand. "Scott O'Hara" is kissing the tip of his magnificently arching cock. Solo sex can be as richly creative as partner sex. If we don't relate to ourselves as sexual beings, how can we expect others to? Rosen's pioneering work has also been reviewed by Clean Sheets.
Steinberg is to be commended for providing a gateway to the work of so many outstanding artists -- if this is the first book of sexual photography you buy, it's guaranteed not to be the last. Photo Sex takes a giant step toward creating the kind of world where it could take its rightful place on coffee tables, a world where sex and art stand side by side.
