The Body In Question

There are nudes, and then there are nudes. Along the route of controversy a body need not even be present: witness the reaction to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, where the mere suggestion of bodily function is enough to continually scare up a mob. France is a sort of citadel of the aesthetic nude, one which endlessly replicates itself in hundreds of daily permutations. Visit facebook.fr, where the censors have evidently thrown up their hands, unable to stem the flood of exhibitionism both personal and archival. I recently attended an event at the town hall in Paris’ tony seventh arrondissement, whose walls are adorned with come-hither cupids, which not only would never pass muster in Cincinnati, but would likely get the painter arrested and charged with trafficking in pornography.

Diane Arbus’s A Naked Man Being A Woman, NYC, (1968) hasn’t lost any of its power to disturb. Unlike the internet’s battery of flesh, it has something to say—and yet, apart from nipples, no private parts are shown. The man dares you to look. It is worthwhile to remember what Arbus wrote: “I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”

Viewed from this angle, the photographer is the subject on trial and not the sitter or person in the street.  Who is she or he? What are they aiming at? What are they willing to reveal—of themselves? A character walks into the room in a novel and we only know what the writer tells us. The character nevertheless exists and may have kept a few secrets for themselves. The photographed person exists in a kind of triply reflected space between their reality, the photographer’s and ours. We only see what the man behind the camera can intuit.  

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto is a Spanish photographer (Madrid, 1958) with numerous books to his credit, who has, over the last ten or so years, traveled extensively in Ethiopia, Peru and other parts of the world. He has returned to Ethiopia on numerous occasions, his photography fueled by an obsession with that remote, deeply religious country. His recent show at the VU Gallery on Rue Saint-Lazare featured large format color photos, some of them nudes, both men and women. On one of his sojourns in Latin America, he collected the work of Martin Chambi (Puno, Peru, 1891) of Peru, who worked in the first half of the 20th century.

Castro Prieto has a sensitive, nuanced eye and his photographs from Ethiopia are beautiful—mood pieces. They evoke. To no longer peer at ceremonies and persons like a tourist, an outsider—this is a much more difficult act than pressing a shutter. His male nudes—a young boy, arms spread against a wall of rock, his upper torso covered with pigment tatoos—engage the viewer more deeply than the females, who are retreating, hesitant. Hard to avoid is the conclusion that it’s the photographer who is bashful, who refuses to wait for the moment when the subject reveals what’s underneath the skin. Is everyone exhausted after the endless debates about the male gaze and the privileges of the First World? Just the same, you have to deliver. Only with Jeune doutant (2002), a smaller, black and white image, do we begin to see a kind of wary engagement between artist and subject.     

Unless his estate is keeping them hidden, there isn’t a single nude in Martin Chambi’s work. That in itself is remarkable: photography has been synonymous with disrobing and the strip tease since its inception. Was it reluctance on Chambi’s part, local mores, or restrictions of colonial society? It hardly matters. If Maxim Gorky had been born in Peru and taken up the camera instead of the pen, this is what his work might have looked like.  

The Giant – Juan de la Cruz Silhuana—what more would we learn if he were naked? Would it increase our fascination one iota? That is not to say that we are compelled to look at him because of his height. We look because of his presence, his thereness, his absolute reality. Did he have children? How well did he know Chambi? He looks as if he had walked off the street, that he was used to being stared at and knew how to stare back, stood in the studio with his long arms dangling at his side for the ten minutes it took to arrange the picture and then ambled back out. He’s fascinated, even terrified by the camera.  Had he ever been photographed before? He is, as they say, naked under his rough patchwork of clothes, the garb of a freelancer from the food stalls or a wood carter. I’d like to know what the top of his head looks like!