Nothing Symmetrical

I did not know Sally Mann, or of fame she made out of those photos of her children naked. I saw her bio documentary last weekend entirely unimpressed. Her works of kids appeared to be just mediocre or even pretentious photographs of house wife photographer taken out of the context. So I found it such an irony that  the whole phenomena came/blown out of proportion and treated as some sort of artistic sensationalism. To my standard, they were not even the level of sensationalism. They were simply boring works in black and white. Sorry, but there is some truth in this take of mine on Mann's photographs.

Apparently I am influenced by Nakadate's body of works of ten years, I admit that Mann also gave me some food for thoughts in the light of what it means to take/see photos shot by female photographers.

Those works of Nakadate's are replete with wary tension and attention for exploitative moments, but since she seemed completely strategic of this obvious and recurrent theme, I found them less intriguing than I had imagined they would be. What still unusually fascinates me is her tireless pursuit of brutal encounters between human body vs. nature. To put it more precise, how vulnerable human bodies could be in the vast nature. She repeatedly tried to set out for the quest in the quasi cow-boy style as if half to re-imagine the days of west forward exploration and the rest to deny the structure of the idea of west as the destination of progress.

But the most visceral moment was her exposing the asymmetrical relationship with female and male body: now you know what she really wanted to achieve by picking up those famously ugly men and made them appear in her video works. No plausibly attractive men were observed in the series of her works. Or in her works, at all. On the contrary, all the men were borderline creeps to the extent that it was not easy to look at them. Those are monstrously ugly men. One possible hyperthesis to explain Nakadate's intention to employ those is to expose how asymmetrical men and women are even in each side's intention. Let alone their physical appearances. Men are this ugly and still believe that they are in a romantic moment as long as they are sitting with women. That is the historical and collective narrative of men and women. Men have possibly believed that it is love when a women is around and they are attracted to the woman. Nakadate completely destroyed their self-serving belief and imposition of themselves on women. To do so, Nakadate simply showed how ugly those men are. Men still believe there is something symmetrical because they are men and women whereas there is nothing symmetrical between them and Nakadate.