Levé shows how time and again what we see is so seldom what we get. “You” is disappointed with traveling when the experience doesn’t match his expectations he prefers foreign songs in which he can’t tell if the lyrics match the tone of the music he prefers to imagine the contents of books from their titles, rather than read them. Pornography, he declares, is not capturing real sex.
The clothes on the people, their indifferent faces are as far from sex as we can get. We expect gritty and dirty and sexual, but what we get are poses which imply sex and nothing more. This is much of what Levé’s series, “Pornography,” is about. As translator Jan Steyn points out in his afterword, all of Levé’s art and writing is concerned with how the names of places, the surface of objects, can lead us to expect something so different than what is truly on the inside. Levé was acutely aware of the ways in which ideas-printed words or images-morph once placed onto the page. You dished it out like your father and you took it like your mother.” One day you directed the violence you had inherited toward yourself. Your mother was sympathetic to the suffering of others. He says of his friend’s ability to shoot himself in the head, “Your father exerted his violence on others. Levé knows depression, he understands the ironies of the world, he pushes his reader into uncomfortable places and forces us to laugh. Years later, in the run of a dry summer, the river being low, your grandfather found. Levé writes beautifully about the simplest of moments, reminding us both of the pleasures of life and the sadness one must feel at being numb to them: “One day, when I was doing stunts on the branches above the water, my watch fell in. Then again, how stubborn can I be? The man turned in a book titled Suicideand then killed himself.Īrt is like pornography-you know it when you see it-and the beauty of the language in Suicide, the obvious formal constructs, the careful observation, the sparse but lilting language, all merit more mention than the author’s circumstances. I did not want to think about the fact that Levé turned the manuscript of this book into his publisher and then killed himself ten days later. This is all I want to say because it’s all I wanted to think about while reading the book. We know little about the narrator but crawl intimately into the mind of his friend. I mention this because I am stubborn, and I want to introduce Levé’s final book-his first published in English-with only an explanation of the story it tells, not by exposing what I know is beneath the surface: Suicide (I want to write) portrays the recollections of an unnamed narrator (“I”) about his friend (“you”) who committed suicide twenty years earlier. It is this clothing, this refusal to remove the barrier we are overtly aware is there, that makes us want to look closer.
The people in the photos are in lurid, sexual positions, but their bodies are fully clothed in business attire: there isn’t a genital in sight.
They can take a mundane moment and capture it in a powerful way… But an image that was created, that had its elements consciously placed and its composition arranged… That’s painting with light.Artist and writer Edouard Levé composed a series of photographs titled “Pornography” that derive their disturbing, yet intimate, quality from how little they expose. There are many shooters who have a good eye. The staged and constructed image is so much more compelling than a serendipitous one. This site is NOT about landscape images, the clever shot found within the journalistic disciplines of street & people photography, nor is it about abstract imagery, although each genre certainly has its masters. This art form lives beyond the typical genres of photography. Beyond the unique eye that captures a given situation, these artists create the events, the environments or the emotion. Photographic artists make specific choices when staging their images. This blog is about photographic art that was created on purpose, not simple snap-shots that were stumbled upon. Staged Photography is a celebration of images that were made consciously.