“All your life / You’ve been waiting to be free / Trade your pride for ecstasy / That’ll make you / Reach the sky” – Sadeness (Part II)
Last August I acted in a music video for the band Enigma‘s new song Sadeness (Part II). The song was released in October.
What do you think? …I’ve noticed both the song and the music video have had mixed reactions from hardcore fans. I don’t know how to to talk about music, so I won’t say anything about the song. Some fans have asked if there’s a version of the video without pixelated-private-parts. Well I haven’t come across one. I guess I could start claiming that that’s actually just what I look like naked.
The story in the music video has two characters – a dark, brooding monk and a mysterious seductive woman. You’ll notice that I played the latter. At first the mysterious woman is a luring temptress.
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
The monk takes her to his decadent den of dark desires.
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Now the woman is a prisoner.
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
There is some inevitable running away and chasing.
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
And an ultimate fight between good and evil.
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
Enigma Sadeness (Part II) music video
And in the end, it turns out…well, I shouldn’t spoil it. So I guess you should just watch the video.
Can there be a culturally appropriate art? There is no shortage of activists arguing for one, and they are arguing for something new and sinister, in free societies at least.
Let me be clear about the stakes. Artists reflect the ideas of their times, and nearly all Western novels and dramas now treat, say, gays and lesbians sympathetically. They are a world away from the thrillers of the 1970s in which the lisping homosexual was invariably the villain. Such stereotypes are not the issue today. Nor is the argument about whether a male novelist can create convincing female characters or vice versa or a white novelist create a convincing black character or vice versa. Readers have always been able to complain that a novelist has produced inauthentic work. Rather than an argument about what is said, we have an argument about what right artists have to speak…
An interesting article about a series of conceptual photographs by Rebecca Drolen exploring women’s hair.
There is a very complex relationship between a woman and her hair… “I entered making this work with a sense of fascination that hair is both beautiful and repulsive in our culture. The fragile influence of context is its only distinction. We see long hair on a woman as a symbol of beauty and femininity, but as soon as the hair is cut or removed the body, we think of it as unsanitary and strange. Likewise, we seem to never have enough hair in the places we want it, and too much hair in the places that we don’t want it to be!” –Rebecca Drolen
“Before it materialized as the camera and lens, photography was an idea. The desire to make a special kind of representation, originating in the object itself, is as old as humankind. It appears in the stencil paintings of hands in prehistoric art. In Western culture, the legend of the Corinthian woman who traced the shadow of her lover on a wall before he departed for war has evolved into an origin story for figurative art and, in the 1840s, for photography.” – Mary Warner Marien, Syracuse University fine art professor, in the introduction to ‘100 Ideas That Changed Photography’
“Samuel F. B. Morse observed that a photograph could not be called a copy, but was a portion of nature itself. That notion, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, found new life in the late twentieth-century language theory, in which the photograph was characterized as an imprint or transfer of the real, like a fingerprint.”
“Samuel F. B. Morse observed that a photograph could not be called a copy, but was a portion of nature itself. That notion, which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, found new life in the late twentieth-century language theory, in which the photograph was characterized as an imprint or transfer of the real, like a fingerprint.”
The American photographer’s new monograph, I Heart Girl, is an unflinching and real look at the beauty of diversity and the female body.
this is a fantastic interview.
“It’s an impossible task to de-sexualise women. I think sexual identity is important for the self and I care about celebrating and honouring what resonates with how each subject chooses to express herself. I’m merely capturing and presenting a facet of women, what the viewer does with that information is her business!”
The American photographer’s new monograph, I Heart Girl, is an unflinching and real look at the beauty of diversity and the female body.
this is a fantastic interview.
“It’s an impossible task to de-sexualise women. I think sexual identity is important for the self and I care about celebrating and honouring what resonates with how each subject chooses to express herself. I’m merely capturing and presenting a facet of women, what the viewer does with that information is her business!”
“The character in Anonymous, LA, 2009 is both present and theatrical, instantly causing one to question the reality and fantasy present in the image. This boundary between the two worlds of fiction and non-fiction has been a longstanding division for the photographic medium, and Grannan’s Boulevard only blurs this line further. The staging of the whitewashed walls, masterful lighting, and expressive, yet controlled faces only go to create more of a collapse between the individual and the character portrayed in each image. This affect is stunning and complex, directing the viewer to question the role of the artist in the individual’s narrative.”
“the plan was simple, just walk around the centre of Bristol and react and shoot what we find. […] Rebecca is a truly awesome model to work with, i just love her looks, she always look like she has something to say and you want to listen.”
