Interesting reading in the Gatochy Blog today at http://gatochy.blogspot.com/2006/06/sex-in-movies.html .  I've been uncomfortable with the idea of transitioning from still to motion photography, particularly with my sexual work, and this blog entry sorted much of it out for me.

Make sense to anyone else?

-Don

Edit:  Fixed.  It was that "." at the end.

Not found..

Which is a shame.. Was looking forward to reading something before someone started a fight over it..

I tend to agree the the Blog comments, but that is not my own complete personal objection.  In addition to his points, a two dimensional still photograph includes, by definition, a sort of abstract, esp in B&W which is my own preference. Add color and the abstraction is reduced a bit. Add motion and suddenly I feel like a voyer.

Don--it's nonsense . . . much more revealing of the writer's response to subject and medium than comment on the aesthetic experience afforded by a cinema that depicts the sexual nature of its characters.  I doubt anyone was aroused by watching, say, Looking for Mr. Goodbar or Klute (now that's going way back) for that matter.  Whether we want to continue suspending disbelief while watching Billy Bob royally boff Halle Barry may be another thing, and yet, this is the thing, it would be a Hollywood thing, and we have all come to live with watching the film, armchair directing the film, and hearing about the making of the film while watching the film too.  Little of disbelief remains for suspension. 

The issues in your art stand apart from issues involving theatrical entertainments.  You've been getting the real deal as regards bound (minor interest) or masturbating (major interest) girls and lavishing craft attention on the after-the-fact artifacts: the prints.  Would mpegs dissolve the walls any less?  I doubt it.  What they may do, however, is cheapen the effort.  There's something to shooting film and treating the print as a composer would a piece of music versus the the old tilt and pan in blue movie fashion.  You could, however, bring that art up to speed as well.

You've also maintained a gritty to smoothly mysterious naturalism in your work, sort of documentary production values, and if you were to roll stock, well, how much more would the artifice involved alter the character of the situations created?  That kind of question strikes me as more cogent here than the effect of a young Jane Fonda spreading her legs for a detective (Donald Sutherland) in a daring piece of 1970's noire.

While I'm inclined to commart's views, I'm not as positive.

That the blog author himself finds that "The minute there's anything more explicit my reaction is political, not artistic. I wake up from that make-belief world ..." does say more for his views than it does about the absolute--yet it is a reaction many people have noticed (though not always shifting into the political realm!). Even so, the situation for still photographs isn't necessarily any different.

Yes, stills are more removed from reality than moving images, and B/W even more so, but there are folks for whom still images are just as uninvolving story-line-wise as there are folks for whom it's mere titillation; the subject matter appears to be as strong a motivating factor than the viewer.

In other words...I waffle.