Nudes

“Nudes” is a project where I’m photographing men naked in their bedrooms, using instant film. With my project I want to revert the “traditional” model-photographer role, explore the positions of power and submission, and to challenge the cliches of gender-specific visual representation.

My project started with a Google search – back in 2014, I Googled “nudes” and found thousands of photographs of naked women staring back at me, and hardly any men among them. That was no surprise to me – the history of art and common visual culture has been, and still is, filled with female and rarely male nudity, images that are created by men and for men to consume. Being a woman and a photographer, and living in Russia with very strong patriarchal ideas about femininity and masculinity, I felt like women are not seen as someone with a need to stare, to visually consume and enjoy the beauty of the other sex. In Russia we have a saying: “A man loves with his eyes, and a woman – with her ears”. I wanted to prove this idiom wrong and reverse the traditional photographer-model roles by photographing handsome men naked, intimately in their bedrooms, with an instant film camera – a plot I have seen numerous times in projects created by men.

I photographed my significant others, friends and strangers. As I went on with my series, I quickly found out that being seen and portrayed as "soft" is a bigger taboo for men than nudity itself. So, instead of focusing on the “object – subject” side of the story, I went on playing with masculine-feminine posing and representation clichés, making my models look fragile, vulnerable and exposed.

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