Shooting Molly

Molly Moore wrote a post about photographing and being photographed nude. On twitter, she joked that she was proud to say she’d taken my cherry. Because it was the first time I’d ever photographed a willing, nude model. I’ve shot performance art that contained nudity, but that’s different; they are already offering up what they are doing as ‘spectacle’ to a determinate audience. It isn’t intimate. It’s a public act that I have documented. This was very different.

I wanted to write this post to mark the experience and to explain what I learned from it. I had assumptions, and plans, and when I was met with the reality of it – like most intense experiences – it was entirely different from what I anticipated it would be.

I always assumed shooting someone who I knew, nude, would be an erotic experience. And it was, but not at all in the way I thought it would be. It wasn’t sexual, but it was intensely sensual.

The first thing that became stunningly clear is that clothes break up the body. They interrupt the lines of the body, bleed it into the background. A naked body becomes a very solid, very present form. Sounds silly, but believe me, it’s a shock. Your subject is suddenly very, very present. An single-shaded organic shape. And so colour, shape, light, shadow, texture and line really become the first things your eye starts to work with in the composition.

So at first, I was concentrating on just that contrast – white skin against a dark tree bough. Then the flesh, smooth against the rough, patterned surface of the tree bark. Then lines and shapes: the organic lines of legs, arms, torso, profile juxtaposed against the geometrically cut gravestones, the railings, the bare earth beneath her. Where those shapes were echoed, and where they crossed, and fought against each other for balance. The dapple of light on her body, how it was coming down in shafts between the leaves, where it was illuminating her. The weight of her light body against the dark background, in balance, unbalanced. Her leg hanging, arm dangling, breast canted. Gravity there in the photograph, acting on a body. Motion delayed.

I could have played with just those things for hours. It is very compelling to deconstruct the body in this way. It feels transgressive to do it – to reduce someone you know and like to part of a composition. Molly as part of the landscape; Molly in opposition to the stone; Molly smooth against the roughness of the bark. It’s entertaining, and impressionistic. And yet, I felt strangely guilty about it. I’m sure it wouldn’t bothered have Molly. But it bothered me that I could so easily reduce her to the elements and principles of art. Something I have taught, year in and year out, for what seems like ages.

So, I decided to focus more on the context. The graveyard. A real woman’s body – that’s been lived in, and borne children. I thought about Gothic Victorian novels and how liminal the female body was for them, how fragile and fleeting, how forever-imperiled by disease, and poverty, and childbirth and violence.

This graveyard was full of dead women and their epitaphs. Tender and formal, steadfastly denying the nature of decay, and the truth of bones, the moist dead meat left behind when the soul has fled. The sublimation of the natural world for some quaint, narrative ideal.

Finally, I remembered a lecture by Judith Butler, strangely enough, about the photographs of Abu Ghraib. The act of the lens as aggressor, as an enabler, the shutter as trigger that sets the wheels of atrocity in motion, the ease and casualness digital image-making as normalizer of obscenity. And I thought about the camera as death. Not the angel of death, not the murderer in the woods, but death waiting, watching, observing a body in the slow process of dying. Not now, not tomorrow, but inevitably and the awful patience of that eye.

That was my experience of photographing Molly Moore. I really can’t say when I have learned more in two hours.