The Photographer Poses a Nude

 

I proceed to enact a daguerreotype, a portrait, of a nude human body. I desire the body, the nude, for its pliable form. Shapable still-life, form requiring will. I will need to place my hands on you, move you, to sculpt your body into lights and shadows. I choose you because you are beautiful to me, interesting, unique. You consent, or choose, “for art,” you say, “for art I will remove all my clothing and exist only in my skin and bones,” “for art I will be naked.”

And I agree. Regardless of artifice or style, mechanisms or techniques, art reveals us naked, as we are in our skins, our fragile, porous borders. I must touch you. Art cannot occur in solitude. Always there must be “other.” Always there must be “form,” a here and a there, an inside / outside, a marking and memory.

I do not know how it feels for you to have my hands upon your body. You lie still. You are naked, are beautiful. I place my palm underneath of your knees and pull them up toward your chest. Your calves I press firmly along your thighs to the point where your heels cleave buttock. Sharp angles, slow curves, deep shadow. My fingers trace around your bottom and up the small of your back, learning your spine, your lines. I whisper.

Firmly, quietly, I shove your shoulder up over your knee and push your blade firmly, flattening a slope with a vertebrate edge, cupping the folds of your legs and creating shades of muscle and rib along the contortion of your back. Turning your face to the floor, I stress the creases of the tendons securing your neck. I use your hair like a pencil. Sketching and tracing the shape of your skull like thick charcoal, then drawing out strands for fine points, contour every which way of scapula and horizon, blade-rib-spine for highlight, sweet water of flesh as it pours your body and bends.

This takes time and concentration, you must hold still while your figure trembles. The arms? The hands? I flatten one out between my own, straining the fingers as widely as I’m able, squashing it against the surface where your face ought to be, now hidden beneath the likeness of your hair, pivoted on your nose and your crown. The other I stretch along your back to your bottom as a mirror, a reflected wave providing border and frame to the curling fetus of your twisting torso.

Hold there. Adjusting your digits to the swerve of your buttock, I tap them to the turn of your thigh. You are beautiful, pliable, soft. I stare. I close my eyes and gently feel my way over every shape of you in the dark. A blind man finding my way along the rocks of a beach, underwater. I imagine work onto paper, in wet clay or cool marble, correcting some angles of compromised gradients, pools of stasis, until you exist only as flow and obstruction. Yes there, yes there. How do you feel? Do not answer, you cannot afford to breathe, you are art, an object, an artifact.

Stay as I fix my devices, reform your surround, and manipulate tools. Stay.

We begin. I shape you, you will. I twist you, you choose. We wait, we wait, attendant to the sky.