Helmut Newton - for Walter Steiger, 1983

Hundreds (thousands) of years of  patriarchate are vanished when we have this frame in front of our eyes. It is a statement photograph which through its particulat sign of victory puts to an end an era in which the woman was never consider to be of any good.
Only this time, the woman sits on her own foot even if it is via an erotic form of manifestation.
The woman daringly springs out and all the men suddenly become uninteresting, as they become secondary.

Andre Kertesz, Scherzo, June, 1919

 

I see a conflict in this picture. An ancestral one. A conflict between earth and sky, between a playful state and an immutable state and finally between man and divinity.

Man created God as an authority figure and it is the man who contests God, in the same way  as he sometimes despises him and in the same way as sometimes he challenges him.

Bill Brandt. Nude

 

Bondage and...that's about it, apparently (?) 

I would say that there is more to it. I would say that we are dealing with an enciphered photo that is tempting us to search for (a) certain meaning (s)

The components are within our reach: nude, white, black. The black present in the pubian area takes the sexuality of the frame one step further in an explicit way whilst the white of the skin induces me the feeling of undiscovered areas.

The black is invading the white but it is not a sudden invasion but more like an insidious one. 

The sexual black is invading the white through that cord wrapping the woman's body and even her face which is entirely covered. 

What does this say to me ? Perhaps that the woman is a victim of its own sexuality or of a sexuality projected from outside. Or most likely.

Masao Yamamoto

 

A metaphoric photo. The key elements are within our proximate reach: white and black. A white that is stained by black, a trail of human sins in a so called white and pure landscape.

What are we humans leave behind after we are gone ? I would say we leave behind lots of sins, frustrations, un-accomplishments, ambiguities. That is to say a black trail onto a white landscape.

Andre Kertesz, New York, 1973

What we have here is more or less an ordinary architectural photograph. I have seen both worse and better ones.

But what is intriguing in this particular picture are the human shadows. Who are symbolizing for me a human presence that is more and more dissipated in a more and more citified and hyper- architecturized landscape.

Is it me or we are gradually losing ourselves and our humanity in all this amalgam of glass and concrete ?

Edward Weston - Attic

 

Humans are complicated beings. Contrary to a wall that is to say that exists by the help of very clear directing lines (straight edges, straight angles) that undoubtedly and predictably intersects with other straight lines in a certain and precise point.

On the other hand, a human being is nothing like that. He (she) starts her going on a route so can straight after unpredictably and suddenly turn to another direction.

Also, the human being in general (and here in this picture clearly suggested to me) is crossed by fears, anguishes hence the body position of the subject, turned away from the camera's eye. 

In any case, the human being is not in the least buildings' mathematics.

Roger Ballen

One of the photos that draw my attention in a particular way. It brilliantly illustrates my belief that photography has to be used as a mean in itself and not in the least a s a purpose in itself so it can be called art.

What I see here is a quite existentialist photo if I may say so. I see a man tormented by his own frustrations and anxieties. I really have no idea wether Roger Ballen really meant this by this photograph but this is what I see in that ball above the subject's head.

Stray Dog - Daido Moriyama

This is a photograph that is haunting me and of which I am never tired or bored looking at.

It leaves me with restlesness and also with a sort of anxiety that can be hardly described through words. 

It is a violent photograph, firstly because the glance of the dog and secondly because of the harsh black and white tones that leaves me with no "grey" impressions. It is anyway the specific signature of Daido Moriyama that is applied to almost all of his work.

In this particular photograph, I am nailed by the dog's glance at me. And what I see in his glance is all the violence that the human was ever capable of, and that in some way or another is always returned to him. Even under the way of this stray dog, uncapable of giving love and affection as long as he does not receives it.