“I had been an activist and a feminist since my teens,” remembers Brooklyn-based photographer Chris Verene of his 1990s monograph Camera Club, for which he entered and documented gatherings of men who entice women to pose nude. Under the guise of being well-connected photographers within the fashion and modeling industries, these men are often amateur artists who will use the images to their own ends, offering nothing in the way of payment or professional exposure to the women they deceive.
Python, 2013
The Hotel Geneva, 2010
For The Gods, London-based photographer Ivar Wigan immerses himself within the culture of hustlers of the American South, slipping into strip clubs and street parties to capture the threads of resilience and enterprise that shine brightly within the throes helter-skelter abandon.
Diane Upstairs in tne Bedroom
Hawk, Cherry and Moses
The School Teacher’s House
Taylor Camp was not a commune, Hawaii-based photographer John Wehrheim says, and there were no rules. Set at the edge of the road along the beach of the ancient island of Kauai, the tiny village was home to restless souls longing to escape from the unrest of their generation, from the traumas of the Vietnam War, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. Youngsters from around the country fled to Taylor Camp, where they erected and lived in makeshift tree houses of bamboo and tin, rode the surf, lounged in the nude, smoked weed, fished and farmed, and raised their children.
“This is not another fat kid’s story,” cautions Los Angeles-based photographer Samantha Geballe of Self-Untitled, in which she catalogs her body over two years. The ongoing narrative is cleaved carefully into two phases, a before and after that run along and at times overlap the murky and ambiguous line marked by a gastric bypass part way through. Self-Untitled is, as Geballe suggests, a series that defies easy answers, a tale in which agony and courage, isolation and redemption, become uncomfortably commingled.
Dirk and Jenny sitting in front of the computer. Both regularly write in a blog about their life together.
Dirk and Jenny got married after a year. Jenny wears a necklace with a heart. A ring would not fit over her silicone finger.
Dirk powders and massages Jenny’s feet. He cares for her silicone skin every Sunday after bathing to keep it soft.
Dirk and Jenny were wed in their apartment, dressed in their finest attire. Dirk gifted Jenny with a heart-shaped pendant, and the slow melodies of Neil Young’s Such a Woman could be heard in the background. Dirk officiated the ceremony himself. Unlike most blushing brides, Jenny was and is a “real doll,” designed to look closely like a human woman although she is made of silicone. As Germany-based photographer Sandra Hoyn learned throughout her time documenting Dirk’s marriage to Jenny, their bond cuts deeper than that between a man and his sex doll; for Dirk, Jenny is a life partner.
For Ô les mains, Belgian photographer Jeffrey Vanhoutte and artist Babak Hosseiny fabricate human bodies in which hands overtake and engulf the remaining anatomy. Here, they transform the normally functional apparatus into adversarial appendages, with each digit becoming a corporeal manifestation of each subject’s internal anxieties and desires.
“They are maternity photos, but only because Dandi is pregnant,” says Vancouver-based photographer Jackie Dives of her recent session with popular musician Dandi Wind and her partner Matija. She knew she would chronicle Dandi’s pregnancy the moment she heard that the couple was expecting, and she knew that she would approach the work as a documentary series rather than a maternity shoot, cutting through the easy sentimentality of the genre to discover the authentic and spontaneous currents of sweetness and vulnerability that run between mother and father in the weeks preceding parenthood.
Yolanda
When London-born photographer Annie Collinge traveled across the globe to Manhattan, she could not have predicted that she would discover in one of the city’s many flea markets a discarded doll that undeniably resembled her faraway aunt Yolanda. The likeness of the 1960s antique figure, masked in goggles and outfitted for a day of skiing, to a true—if tiny— human being was what first compelled the photographer to embark on Five Inches of Limbo, for which she paired real, live sitters with their porcelain doubles.
“I want them to be happy,” Moscow photographer Igor Samolet says of the band of teens and twenty-somethings he met three years ago while revisiting the small town where he went to school. He was drawn to them immediately, to their recklessness and resilience, their courage and their confusion. Be Happy! is his tribute to their adventures, their booze-soaked evenings spent sprawled naked on the floor, and the adolescent dreams and impulses and sensations that animate their youth.
For Die Nacktwanderer, or The Nude Hikers, Lausanne-based photographer Roshan Adhihetty chronicles the adventures of a group of nature-enthusiasts who prefer to backpack in the buff, when their naked bodies can come into intimate contact with the wilderness that surrounds them.
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