Just a few lines to try and get at the essence of why the nude. That is something that I think may be exceptionally open to absolute failure.

I began the Woman Project with the intention of exploring the mysteries of attraction and the rules of a game that none of us has an answer for, since this is not a subject anyone can begin to claim expertise in. It is a mystery whose exploration has been at the root of humanity’s creative output throughout our collective cultures. Poetry, music, painting, sculpture, literature, every form of art we have created has been a result of the search for the answer to why we are attracted to one another, why we form societies and why we come together in these complex relationships that form the very backbone of our civilisations.

To come back to the title’s focus… The nude is one of the traditional art forms we have chosen to explore for, I suppose, all of our history. It creates all kinds of discussion. It can be seen as provocative or exploitative, adulatory or morally dangerous, it has been seen as sexual or votive.

In the case of my project the nude sets were more or less an after thought. After working on the initial set WOMAN • MOVIE STAR • ICON series, in which one of my sitters chose a nude set as her Icon. The thought occurred that it would be very hard to create a series of and about women and how I related to them without including an exploration of some nude work. It seemed to me that the series would be poorer without it. At the same time I realised once more that I was not interested in shooting nudity without a concept behind it.

My original intent was to create an adjunct set under the title of Private Places. It was meant to be a set telling stories about intimacy and it involved the idea of working on the basis of loosely filmic approaches. In the end this proved somewhat too difficult to create, since it meant a much more intense set of requirements in terms of locations and other restrictive necessities which were outside of my budget and logistical capacity.

This also brings me to the most major issue I faced once I decided to create this series. This was the question of the “Male Gaze”. The male gaze quite correctly frames the notion that for millennia men have looked at women and objectified them. Imposing their own sexual and aesthetic preferences on them, interfering with their body image, setting standards of beauty and perfection that are way beyond achievable by any real human being. It also does something even more insidious; it sends a message that how men see women is the dominant image of women, not their own self image and so on.

Of course men are prey to this problem in a massive way, but women are also often forced into seeing themselves in that framework, and so becoming accidentally complicit. Years of religious and social propaganda has meant that both sexes are locked in a self replicating system of oppression and misrepresentation.

So my rather perhaps lame solution to this problem was to create every single shot and section of the Woman Project in long discussion and cooperation with the sitters. I tried to question their decisions as much as I questioned my own, to side-step in as much as that is possible doing precisely what creates all the problems of the Male Gaze. I don’t know to what extent, if at all, I succeeded, but the project, for now is done and can be viewed on this site, in all its parts.

Anyway some of the nude work is posted here.