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Ungeniert
weist der Photograph Tony Ryan uns in die Rolle des neugierigen Voyeurs.
Wir sollen uns nicht nur in der passiven Rolle des zu unterhaltenen
Publikums gefallen, sondern zu Tätern - zu willigen, genußbereiten
Mittätern seiner Kunst werden. Wir sollen aufhören, eine Ausstellung
unreflektiert zu konsumieren, um sie anschließend zu vergessen, denn
Tony Ryan zeigt uns keine Bilderflut voller durchgestylter Plastik-Schönheiten.
Er bringt uns viel lieber den Menschen von seiner intimen Seite nahe. Er
hält uns mit seinen sinnlichen Photographien den Spiegel vor die Nase
und läßt uns uns selbst betrachten, bestaunen, entdecken und führt
uns so zu uns selbst zurück, aber nicht, ohne uns auch ein wenig in
Frage zu stellen.
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The
Preponderance of Women
I think that I always wanted to
photograph women for all the usual reasons, but over the last decade I
have allowed my models to participate in planning the shoot. This
produced the wonderful complexity of two different minds on the same
project and got me closest to my ideal of cramming maximum content and
associations into an apparently simple composition.
I've tried landscapes, Cartier-Bresson-type street images, even
artschool abstracts, but nothing else produced strong images as
consistently as my female models.
The imaging of women in art is, of course, enormously problematic - not
least because of the enormous weight of thousands of years of
male-dominated art. Consciously or unconsciously I quote from that
history. At the same time there is a special tension between male
photographer and female model which, at least in part, comes from the
eternal fascination with the female "other" against decades of
feminist debate that has to some extent touched all women.
At the same time images of women persist in our culture (in both art,
advertising and popular culture) because they are so powerful and
compelling. For instance both men's AND women's magazines have women on
the cover. Even women seem to find pictures of other women - be they
supermodels or royalty - more interesting than men. The problem is not
so much the perception of women as objects of desire but the failure to
perceive them as anything ELSE of equal or greater importance.
To deplore this isn't going to make it go away but when feminists use
the word "pornography" they tend to mean images that create a
false or unrealistic view of women - such as the Playboy imagery that
men tend to think are fairly benign. This is a valid point but I believe
the solution is not prohibition (which never works anyway) but to create
a competing body of images that attempt to show the "real"
women that one could reasonably expect to know as friends and/or lovers.
There is also a growing political issue, particularly in the gay
community, over the comparative absence of the male nude in our culture.
The male penis especially is virtually invisible in popular culture,
advertising and all but the most hardcore porn. What we need, to come to
terms with our humanity, is not so much feminist art or gay art... but
an art that deals evenly with the whole spectrum of human sexuality and
thereby an essential part of what it is to be human.
So I don't mind some of my work being called erotic and I don't mind
being called a voyeur - but those terms don't really explain anything.
Afterall... what makes an image "erotic" when another image,
with the same elements in it, is not? Where does that charge that acts
on our psyche come from? How does it work? Do men, women, gays and
straights ever respond the same way to an erotic image? What, if any, is
the relationship between this process and aesthetics?
I hope you find these questions interesting because I certainly do.
Tony Ryan
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www.beauty-reality.com
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