THE first person through the door on Saturday morning refused to pay
his #1 entrance fee and stood, open-shirted and pot-bellied, leering at
the photographs. Lindsay Lewis of Stills Gallery, currently hosting the
exhibition What She Wants, worried that the notice on the door warning
that the work is too explicit for under-18s was a red rag to bullish
deviants, but her fears proved unfounded. The stream of mixed-sex
spectators soon filled the comment book with approving messages such as
''Well done'' and ''At last!''
Part of Signals, the current UK-wide Festival of Women Photographers,
What She Wants was assembled in response to the anti-pornography debate
of the late eighties. The depictions by over 60 American and European
women of the male body amounts to a spectacular visual volley against
the po-faced censorship camp. The exhibition is a bold and erotic voyage
of discovery for both viewer and artist.
The accompanying text explores the relationship between photographer
and model, revealing an insight and self-examination which is rarely
disclosed by male artists about their female subjects. ''When I first
started photographing his penis I would get headaches. I begin to
realise how much I liked looking at him. That's when the trouble
started. When I put the camera up to my eye I had to acknowledge 'I want
to look at this'. I felt totally exposed,'' admits Robin Shaw.
Slowly perusing the exhibition I succumbed to this hungry look. Women
have still been offered little more than Chippendale beefcake in the way
of erotica but the variety of works on show at Stills cater for a wide
selection of tastes, from the romantically sensual -- Diane Baylis's
close-up of whiskered lips in And Then He Kissed Me -- to more dangerous
flirtations -- Ruth Ruske's velvet-gloved hand clutching a handcuffed
penis in Liaison.
Female views of maleness inevitably focus on phallic imagery and the
majority of the photographs are of penises in various states of
tumescence, swathed in green chiffon in Jane Ralley's witty colour study
Coq D'Azur, slumping from a computer terminal in Flo Fox's User
Friendly, casting a canine shadow in Diane Baylis' Who's Afraid of the
Big Bad Wolf, and peeking through a bouquet in Ralley's A Rose Is A
Rose.
Two untitled works by Herlinde Koelbl present a witty silent satire; a
pert cockerel framed against a man's muscled erect back is juxtaposed
next to a photograph of a dead (or deeply drugged) cockerel curled
around a flaccid penis. Not so cocksure now.
The exhibition is shot through with humour although curator Naomi
Salaman rejected pictures which were too frivolous. There is great
warmth in the portraits, probably arising from the fact that there was
usually a close relationship -- friend or lover -- between artists and
model and many convey a sense of male vulnerability. Thus, while the
women photographs might poke fun at penis-worship the work is not
threatening. Men might blush but they won't cross their legs.
* What She Wants, Stills, Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, till October 22.
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