15 August 2008

Where I get my ideas about sex

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Photo by Eric Francis.

SHORTLY AFTER I moved to a place called Vashon Island, I dreamed that a Bigfoot tribe lived in the woods around my apartment. I lived in the converted half of a garage, an extremely cute little space with a sliding glass back door leading to a healthy patch of woods. We lived toward the lesser-inhabited north side of an island off of Seattle. The main house was 20 steps away.

One distinguishing feature of the island was that it wasn’t connected to the mainland by a bridge. So it was very quiet.

It was a Friday night and I fell asleep unusually early; it was late summer and not long after the Sun had set. I fell out like I had was exhausted or had been drugged, but neither was true. And I had a most incredible dream.

It was as if the walls of the metal garage/apartment structure had turned transparent, and I could see that I was living in a forest inhabited by Bigfoot. There were five or so, large creatures covered in white fur; they were an albino tribe. I could see them, and feel them, as if I had been let into a deeper shade of space and time than the one I was accustomed to.

I knew they were aware of me, and could feel me become aware of them. This revealed the psychic resonance between us, a beautiful, unusual feeling to be so connected to something so different than myself. Then I must have drifted back to sleep.

When I awoke in the morning, I remembered the dream vividly, immediately upon awakening; and I could feel the residue of the empathy we shared for a moment. It did not occur to me that I would ever see them again. Yet it seemed unusually vivid for a dream. I’d had other dreams that felt like astral journeys or events; this one had that mark.

Because my work as an astrologer involves the use of symbols and archetypes, I considered the encrypted message of the dream, even though I knew it might be something a little more. Wherever they had originated, and as real as they had felt, the images of Bigfoot had come through my consciousness and I had perceived them.

The imagery occurred at a pivotal time in my life, when I had just arrived in a new home in a remote part of the country that I had never even visited.

The message seemed to be about primal consciousness, something that was welcoming me and that I was making friends with: feeling and experiencing something at the core of who I am, something normally perceived as legendary but revealed to be true.

As for the astral dimension, the idea that this other species of humans might coexist invisibly around our world, veiled only by the thinnest psychic cloak, felt astonishing and intriguing. I did not know what to make of the fact that they were all white in color rather than the usual gorilla-like color that Sasquatch is usually depicted or seen in. I later learned that in some Eastern legends he is depicted in white, and sometimes called Yeti.

The next night I fell asleep, despite barely being tired and feeling unusually clear in the cool night air of the Pacific Northwest. As I drifted off, I could feel our island surrounded by Puget Sound, our community of a few thousand people isolated on a 600-foot high mountaintop poking out of the sound, silent except for the movement of wind and water. Despite the presence of some people, they were safe here.

I slipped off to sleep into the feeling of a deeper awakening. I had never experienced anything like this, going from awakening conscious to a fully lucid dream. I didn’t dare move. I was in my bed but the walls of my apartment had again become transparent. The feeling was incredible enough, the sense of potential. I lay there breathing, aware of the space wide open around me in all directions. The shaggy white giants were scattered around me, and I could feel their curiosity. I was curious too, but to just go out there and greet them seemed unconscionable.

I could feel the glass door, a few feet from the foot of the bed; I merely had to get up and walk outside. I knew that I could, and I knew they could feel my ambivalence.

The next morning, vivid scenes of this new dream replayed, and I entered the day with a feeling of being transported beyond my own existence. Where, I could only feel, but the world seemed like a cosmos enchanted by the dimension just beyond it. I knew they were continuously there, though I could not perceive them. I sensed them aware of me at every step, but only gently. I wondered who else knew about them.

I could not wait to sleep that night. Fortunately I had a busy, enjoyable day planned, so I thought I could let go of thinking about it. I did not realize that my eagerness to go to sleep was the worldly equivalent of my succumbing to my curiosity that night.

I spent the day photographing a theatrical festival on the island, followed by a party, and finally at around 11 pm I went home. I fell asleep snug in my cottony bed, grateful that I was indoors on a cool autumn night.

I drifted out of normal awareness and was again lucid. The glass doors were now open and blowing a consistent, cool breeze. I knew that I would need to walk out into that to be out there, and somewhere I found the resolve in my heart to step out of bed.

I always slept nude and thought nothing of being nude among them. I walked out and felt the breeze push its refreshing movement into my face, my belly, my thighs. I stepped across a small lawn and toward the forest and when I crossed the woodline, they appeared, not suddenly but gradually, one at a time, in a now-vibrating forest. Every color was rich and defined, even in the darkness. I had different vision. My hearing was also different. I could hear every detail, every cracked twig and leaf under my feet on the forest floor.

They were everywhere. We seemed to hang suspended in mutual awareness of one another. Furtively, timidly, I glanced up and made eye contact. Mostly I could feel them and that was enough, but I craved looking into their eyes. The tone of their emotions was vulnerable and clearly human. Yet there was a wildness that came through in the form of simplicity. I could feel, when in that state, that it would be difficult to conjure language and that is why they were silent; silent but noticing everything and feeling one another. And now feeling me.

I knew what they wanted me to do, or rather, what they were encouraging me to want: to masturbate in that forest, in their presence. My desire, when I first resonated with it, felt alien and enticing, easy to yield to a little more. The desire itself felt good and I knew that I didn’t have to go all the way, I could just enjoy feeling the willingness to. Then it felt so good and I was squatting, and I found that I was masturbating openly in front of three of them.

Others gathered closer, but not too close; they gave me distance to feel, and what I could feel was a state of natural existence. I was aware of a burgeoning space of heat inside me that seemed poised to burst but only swelled larger and warmer. I slipped into the primal, worldless space of being and openly played with the feeling of wanting to orgasm. It felt natural, as did their approval. I reminded myself I was dreaming but felt ridiculous in the midst of how real this was.

We all knew what was going to happen. I wanted and needed to let go, yet the prospect of orgasm seemed so overwhelming, it would be so engulfing and cause me to let go of all of my fears; to get there I had to be fearless for a moment. And emotionally, it felt like I was about to give birth to something larger than myself.

Their empathy made it easy suddenly, and my body started to heave, followed by my voice, and then the energy of my pleasure rippled into the forest and the creatures that were around me. Their awareness embraced me. I invited myself surrender to this feeling of rippling, and I did, crying out in the all-consuming pleasure of ejaculating…so much, coursing in pulses of heat into my palm and then the thirst came over me.

I drank as if from a cup, gulping, still coming, ejaculating in sweet long pulses stronger and unlke anything I’d ever felt before, that I recognized were the pleasure contractions of my companions, they were all cumming, spilling their seed into the Earth as I drank mine.

I remember nothing more.

When I woke up, it was light and I was deep in my bed, and my mouth and face were thickly coated with semen, and some was streaked in my hair.

30 July 2008

If I can do this, I can live my life.

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Photo by Dani Voirin.

I CAN FORGET that it’s the most natural thing in the world that I drink my semen. Then I remember. The mirrors depicted in the Book of Blue series tell the story of a journey of learning deep self-nourishment and practicing self-acceptance. The mirror is my meeting place; the place where I meet myself and the world.

One in particular, a cheap, rectangular Wal Mart special, has become a kind of altar of self-surrender, where I witness my own orgasm and the place of ejaculation. I’ve used mirrors as cum altars before, because they were conveniently there when I was watching myself orgasm. I’d never used or explored them as a place designed as a kind of sacred licking platter, or where semen could collect and dry, leaving a many-layered and infinitely complex pattern. In the process, the mirror became a kind of art piece, then the subject of many photos and self-portraits in the Book of Blue photo series.

At first my models only posed in pristine mirrors. Eventually I discovered they were willing to be depicted in marked mirrors, or to hold them up to the world for me. What I thought would repulse them became a place a number of them have been willing to look for and see themselves.

Most of the time it was the place I would look for and see myself, though often uncomfortably at first. But I could (and can) always work myself into a frenzy. Sometimes I would spill myself onto the mirror and take it back right away, dreaming into the residue of earlier orgasms that were melting into my fresh spill, traces of which would reenter my body. This would leave a layer upon the prior residue that I had left behind, since a little always remains.

Other times I would be repelled by the thought of my semen once I released it. I learned to leave it for another time, to receive while my libido was building rather than after it had dropped from the experience of ejaculation. You may know men who go through this curious experience of self-rejection after they cum. This is why receiving their semen into your body is such a loving gesture. Despite craving it, it is often challenging to do for myself, for this reason.

Along the way, spilling on this particular mirror (and a few others) many times, it occurred to me that what went onto the mirror (this one, or any one I used) would all go back into my body. I would never wash the mirrors, I would only lick them clean. I made this commitment to myself. It felt loving and like I could heal a deep inner split with the gesture. I would receive myself whether it was new warm seed or if it had been deposited hours, weeks or months earlier, or perhaps having spilled out of a condom. (That was true of the oldest, by then yellowed, crystallized mess that was on the mirror when I began.) I kind of made a masturbation rule that when I was alone, the mirror would be my place of surrender, and that all that ever make its mark there I would eventually lick it back down to glass.

This began my rhythm, a cycle. It began with a ritual of working myself up to a sufficient level of desire and erotic heat that I craved my own semen, and my tongue wanted to melt back some of that old ejaculate. Then journeying on that feeling, I would dive into ever deeper places in myself: places of admitting my erotic needs, including for men. I could talk to myself about this odd little ritual I was doing; there are moments where I face my death. After a while I decided that when I licked the mirror, I would always do so naked. The mirror became a place where I could admit anything to myself: any desire, fear, need or fact of my life.

It came to represent the place of abject honesty with myself, pushed by or drawn from my core by the imminence of orgasm.

On many occasions, alone or with different witnesses, I licked the dry semen off of my mirror, stretching the thread between humiliation and humility. Many of my closest friends have seen me do this, women whose primary erotic role in my life is to support and embrace my masturbation and process of self-acceptance.

On one occasion, a kind of prayer came to me: I’ve made a mess and I’m going to clean it up. (Ejaculation often does feel like making a mess, particularly if it’s followed by guilt or shame; and for me it often was.) This became a kind of mantra for my journey, and an invocation of my erotic healing. At other times I saw the patterns not as a mess but rather as an image of my karma and the marks I have made on the world, at some moments witnessing what I had done as beautiful, and at others feeling a need to leave as clear of a mirror as possible. Other times I would slip into an overwhelming sense of how erotic this smeared, spattered mirror I was looking into really was, and invite, allow or encourage myself to meet it with my mouth. Invariably I would spill myself there again. It began to feel like the never-ending cycle of karma.

Occasionally I would explore to a depth that is transcendent as deep cunnilingus or fellatio. I would endeavor to lick back significant portions of the residue of my life that lay on the surface, which is slow, patient going; making eye contact with myself as much as possible. I chose to work on the oldest stuff, because sooner or later it would be coming back in, so I may as well do it right then. From experience alone and with witnesses present, I learned that the older the semen, the more erotic the experience of licking it off. It became a symbol of accepting my past, and being willing to accept myself no matter what. And, the older, the more embarrassing to think what I was doing.

I have learned to be present for and live with that embarrassment, even appreciating it as a gift; until gradually it becomes transparent and I am free to experience what I am doing without judgment. At other times I tune into my feelings and imagination and recognize that I am taking up a sampling of a wide diversity of my orgasms spread over many months, and be reminded of the many times I had knelt over the space and let go.

The mirror and its pattern represent a journey into self, and this often pushed deeper by loss or separation; by unfulfilled desire; by surrendering to and ultimately celebrating the unavailability of someone I want to be with. Each of those marks has a story, its feelings, its fantasies, and its intricate passion. Many of them are the story of taking my one opportunity to go beyond a feeling of loss to a space where I am the one who must fill my own need and consciously feed myself fulfillment, love and the water of life.

On a visual note, the irregular rings on the left on glass in some images are the result of leaving an ejaculation on the mirror overnight, then licking it wet in the morning. What look like brush strokes are really tongue marks that were laid down in fresh semen.

Thank you to all who have held the mirror for me. With some of your help and a lot of mine, I have learned to make love to myself, to love myself.

July 15, 2008 (rev. July 30, 2008)

16 June 2008

Book of Blue in the Daily Freeman

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Photo by Kim Maurer, courtesy of the Daily Freeman.

TODAY BOOK OF BLUE was featured in a “fresh faces in business” supplement in the Kingston Daily Freeman.

Here is what the Freeman said today, written by Kimberly Maurer:

“A New York City native, Eric Francis Coppolino now has set up shop in the Hudson Valley. Eric Francis writes for Chronogram, however, he discovered his true talent with fine art photography. Though his camera lens, Coppolino has captured provocative and captivating images from around the world. He has gained international recognition for delivering a fresh and positive twist of world thought and culture with his photographs. Eric Francis is a funny and knowledgeable yet humble human being. Take a glimpse into his gallery.”

A friendly introduction.

I would add: I am a photographer with a philosophy. My work is emotional, intimate, introspective and at times erotic. I believe that you can only photograph what you truly see, and since you can only see what you feel, I bring my feelings into the work. Soon I will have some lettering added to my storefront window. It will be the inscription – which I would send out dedicated to all photographers – attributed to Anias Nin: We don’t we things as they are. We see them as we are.

I love being photographed as much as I like to take pictures.

I started as a news writer/editor and thus photographer, and have spent a lot of time at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels photographing world leaders – as a hobby, because I happened to have the press access to allow that. I feel like I truly refined my craft doing street photography in Paris for a year, with many travels to London, Amsterdam, Toronto, Montreal and other cities in Europe and North America.

My true love is photographing women. Most Book of Blue pictures are taken into a mirror, a style I’ve developed photographing women in five different countries and in countless sessions over the past three years.

I regularly hire models, and by that I mean people who consider themselves ordinary people rather than fashion plates. You may be any age over 18 and any body type. The introductory interview/session gets us acquainted and from there, we can choose a project to work on. All sessions, including the test/interview, are well compensated.

I also do custom work as a professional portrait photographer. For example, if you would like a intimate portrait of your partner (male or female, or both of you), perhaps a little more risqué than you can do at the Wal-Mart studio, I am the person for the job. I am developing a line of fine art prints for sale, which will be available in July.

The Book of Blue website that you’re now visiting offers photos as well as a mix of fiction, personal essays and nonfiction. I write what I feel, and what is on my mind. As an art or literature project, Book of Blue is an experiment; I’ve designed it to be a playspace for the creation of ideas and images. I have a series in the works on the power of fantasy and how that relates to photography, and another on body image and its relationship to self-esteem.

You can find much more of my photography at PlanetWaves.net (scroll through the “prior covers,” a daily feature I share with my partner Danielle Voiron), and you may reach me at (845) 331-0355 (or by email at egg@bookofblue.com). Visitors and other inquiries are welcome. Bring your photos, or come and look at mine.

Eric Francis Coppolino

11 June 2008

The World I Want to Live In

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Fae from Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.

AS I GOT TO KNOW the woman who says yes (see article below), I was gradually getting to know myself. As she was confronted with her own option to be erotically and emotionally independent, I gradually gained the confidence to embrace that person, and to make my own choices with a clear conscience as well.

This shifted my relationship to her and to all women.

I have also learned something about self-confidence from the process of creating the photographs in Book of Blue, and this journey continues to provide my clearest and most accessible learning environment.

When I set out to do this project, I first had to make peace with the fact that I wanted to do so, and claiming desire is a good way to establish confidence. I had to claim the space in myself, then in my relationships. Actually it may have been the other way around; but at a certain point I don’t think there is a difference between “me” and “my relationships.”

My friend Kit Brown, who I met at the artists’ squat at 59 rue de Rivoli when I was living in Paris, first proposed that photographing nudes was something that could be done full time. I don’t do it full time, but it’s my primary interest in photography. Ideas have a way of propagating, and gradually this one took root. It took a couple of years and many photo sessions. It was easy enough to see that in a sexually repressed culture, this was a privilege I needed to claim.

Along the way, I encountered some objections, but I kept going. I heard a couple of “all guy photographers want to do is photograph nude women,” and “don’t you photograph men?” Nobody asked me if I spent time on the other side of the camera. I do, because I love it; but I wouldn’t feel right about photographing anyone nude or otherwise, were I not a photo subject myself; and I would not ask anyone to do anything that I would not do, including being seen by the public.

One of the first choices I made was to specialize in photographing women. I do photograph some men, but early in the work I made a conscious decision and that represented claiming something – which to me represented a definition of art. This was a conscious act of taking a creative right: art is what you want to do, not what you think you’re supposed to do, or avoiding what you think you’re not supposed to do. As for male photo subjects, I decided that I was man enough.

The second choice was to use mirrors in nearly all of my work. I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Along the way, the question of sex with photo subjects came up in my relationships and with some of my friends. This is one of the obvious things many people wonder when they see photographs of nudes, especially evocative ones: do the photographers have sex with all these beautiful models?

Well, it would be fun if life were that simple. That is the fantasy, right? But people are people wherever you find them, and I don’t think that a studio setting is any more conducive to an erotic encounter than meeting someone at a concert or at work. In fact, it’s a good deal less so, nudity and a plush environment notwithstanding.

Authentic art cannot come out of a space where anyone feels unsafe or insecure. For that to happen, everyone needs to claim responsibility for how they feel. Earlier in the work I might have said, “I have to hold open a safe space,” but now I would say we both must make an agreement to trust one another.

Then at the same time, I learned to be fully in my feelings without those spilling over and imposing on the person I am co-creating with. This took practice, and it still does. When strong feelings come up, one of the easiest responses to cop is denial.

I did not try to learn it, rather I eventually got the posture into my emotions and body – to be real, in the moment, with myself and not judge who I am.

Not that reason counts for everything, but it’s unreasonable for a woman to think that I’m not going to notice her, or how beautiful she is, especially when she’s a few inches from me; and it’s unreasonable of me to think that it should matter to her how I feel any more than she would otherwise. Yet there are all kinds of often contradictory boundaries around looking, seeing and being seen.

In sum, while our society extols the virtue of a woman making herself beautiful, it is considered impolite to more than glance. With this work, we break that taboo; the idea is to provide a space to look such that looking allows feeling, and where being looked at allows the authentic experience of being seen.

There is at the same time an amorous quality to the work that I do. An exchange of feelings, of erotic energy and often of attraction is natural enough; I am photographing what I see, and what I see I see through my feelings. Indeed, I have learned that I am who and what I see. Rather than projecting that beautiful woman outside myself, I feel her alive within me.

Because there is a mirror present all the time, that is where most of the energy goes – into the experience of self-awareness. The mirror itself is the subject of many of the photos, and it most of the time needs to be the primary subject of the model’s awareness. The mirror provides a structure; a focal point; and the person who appears there becomes a third party in the experience.

In a way, this is a more challenging interaction for many models than merely flirting with me. That’s too easy (I’m a flirt); it’s fun but not that visually interesting. There are all kinds of preapproved cultural scripts to draw on, and easy-to-follow predefined power relationships between men and women. It’s more difficult to make a space wherein someone can relate freely to herself, be a witness to herself, stay in her own feelings and maintain eye contact – all with a witness and, notably, all while being photographed.

More often, the atmosphere feels like zero psychic gravity; everything happens slowly with a high level of awareness. This is an unusually authentic space. Sometimes ideas are exchanged, stories, visions of life, and revelations about the subtle ways we feel about ourselves. Often we work in silence. For this to open up and for the creative alchemy to be activated, the people involved need to be present, and affirm one another as autonomous human beings. This is the only world I want to live in.

28 May 2008

The Woman Who Says Yes

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Pathos by Eric Francis from an original by Danielle Voirin.

WE MET AGAIN on the telephone that night.

“Would you tell me the story of Philippe?”

“Okay. The show ended, and we went out for coffee at Place de la Republique. He lived in the neighborhood and asked me if I wanted to come up, and I said yes.”

How simple. With these words, I recognized again that I was talking to the woman who says yes.

She was a different person than Renee; this other person was a woman within her. Renee struggled with giving herself permission to live, and she struggled with sexual guilt. We do not give this other woman a name, but in many conversations we have encountered her, and she has a feeling all her own that we could both relate to. Her voice is different, rich and mellow. She is calm, unapologetic, deeply compassionate and liberated from guilt and reluctance. I love talking with her and hearing her descriptions of life.

One thing about the woman who says yes is that, by agreement, she doesn’t have to worry about hurting me with her erotic or emotional choices. It’s not that I don’t feel pain or abandonment or left out; it’s that by conscious choice I hold the space of taking care of my own feelings and affirming her right and privilege of saying yes, and of allowing her own her experiences and feelings.

Also by agreement, I may be turned on by anything that gets her going; I am entitled to the full spectrum of my responses to her.

I met the woman who says yes shortly after another phase of our journey last autumn, which is covered in a chapter called ‘Flirtation with Aban’. The flirtation involved a friendship with a man named Aban and three different weekends where they made love; and where she encountered and enjoyed his feverishly hot desire for her. In one of these encounters, for the first time in her life, she attempted to have two lovers consciously, the other being me.

She arrived for a long weekend visit and stayed with me in my borrowed apartment in Toronto. That was in mid-August. As luck or the fates would have it, Aban was in the city at the same time. There are a lot of cities in the world, and we were all there at once. She casually mentioned where she was in an email, and he replied immediately. He wanted to see her, and assumed she wanted to see him. In fact she did; but she hadn’t quite explained to him that we were together, or that we were lovers. So he had no way to adjust his expectations.

She didn’t have the guts or the emotional strength to just tell him, particularly on the phone, so in a sense she had to go.

Our time that weekend was alive and we were attentive to one another, though her impending visit with Aban cast a shadow over us. She was nervous. I was a little scared, anticipating the piercing of jealousy, but inwardly devoted to letting go into the experience in honor of my love for. Also, I often find it hot when the women in my life have other lovers, so that helps.

She left Monday morning for where he was staying in North Toronto, working on a film. I walked her to the bus. I felt like I had two choices. I could put her on that bus and ‘give her permission’ to be free and experience her passion, and firmly expect her back; or I could let go of her, knowing that sometimes sex and passion turn to love; and see if she returned.

I was confident that we valued our love for one another, or I would not have been able to handle it. I am not the most confident person in the world but I usually recognize love when I feel it and see it in someone’s eyes. To me love is freedom, and I wanted her to be free and I wanted to appreciate the whole woman, not some extracted part of her. I knew Renee well enough to know the passions she had brewing in her; all the exploration she wanted to do that she did not get to do; I understood her conflicts and I knew that my choice to approve of her as a whole person and hold space for that whole person and all of her feelings was the most important gesture of that moment. So that is what I chose to do, and she got on that bus and I went back to my apartment. Knowing that what happened between them was totally out of my control, I went deeper into myself sexually and emotionally than I ever have.

The most painful part was that there was a total lunar eclipse that night and, weeks before, we had agreed to be together that particular Monday night. I don’t heap a lot of astrology on our relationship, but I deeply respect eclipses. I know they set patterns and as much as I supported her freedom and wanted to throw every drop of my energy behind it, the eclipse troubled me, mainly because they set patterns. And this was not a pattern that I wanted to set – of her being with someone else and not with me, when we had decided to be together and had come to a place specifically be together.

I was not thrilled about this. I also understood the necessity on some level that I could not really express, and I was curious to see what would happen. When you let go into experiences like this, there is an extent to which the whole thing is really out of your control, and that seems to be the whole point. Mostly, in that moment, I stayed with my feelings, and dove into the jealousy, passion and pathos I was feeling urgently, like diving off the top of a volcano into the pool of lava.

I wanted him to know that I was there, aware of him, aware of them, alone and soaking into myself with full awareness: and I asked for that; but that fact was never revealed to him. That particular wish was never granted.

BUT SOMETHING that I was not expecting came to me: eventually being able to see photographs of their penetration. Literally, a series of photos of him pressing his penis into her vulva as she gracefully spread her lips.

This took some months to arrive in my life, and by the time the images illuminated themselves on my monitor we were well into the discussion with the woman who says yes. I had received detailed accounts of their experience; the sight of his face, the sounds they made, what she felt as he let go into her – and how she felt having these experiences.

It was not the person who I originally met who described all of this. It was someone else, someone closer to the core.

The pictures, when they eventually became a thing we saw and talked about, gave us something to say yes to, or maybe just some tangible evidence of reality. Slowly over time, the woman who says yes explained the emotional dynamics of the relationship to me; how it felt to be wanted like that; how she felt ill from anxiety with the whole situation; how she let go and opened up into becoming the receptacle of his pleasure, with pleasure, even in the midst of her conflict.

Before the images entered our shared visual and emotional experience, I thought that only that one existed, rather than many of them. The idea of this one picture, veiled from my sight, loomed in the background of our conversations, of our exploratory emotional reaching into the unfamiliarity of who we were to one another. It stood as something occurring in a dimension apart, a dimension she controlled or at least controlled access to.

To learn what I wanted to learn from her, and to share these experiences, I had to inquire, because Renee is not a talker by nature. Certainly she was not inclined to talk about sex and all its emotions, and surely not sex with someone besides her primary partner. But I asked, and she responded; gradually the conversation became easier and more inwardly grounded; and over time, we discovered I this person who consciously indulged and owned her experiences with a clear conscience.

And as time went on, I developed a close enough relationship to the woman who says yes that she became the person I was relating with and growing with. The other aspects of her—those wracked in sexual guilt, anxiety and hesitation, became side factors, though they still have a voice in our connection. And this has become an experiment in my relating to someone sexually autonomous; and for her, an experiment in being sexually autonomous in the context of her relationship with me.

26 May 2008

Pornography as the Mirror of Denial

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Kelly from the Book of Blue. Photograph by Eric Francis.

THE ORIGINAL pornographic images described prostitutes and what you could do with them. Their point was to get you interested, then you could do the real thing for a fee. In perfect market economy form, the advertisement has become the product. Pornography as we think of it is a media-based form of prostitution. You purchase the image of a person for your private sexual use, in lieu of the original.

For the purveyor, it’s extremely efficient. For a relatively small amount of money, an image can repeatedly be sold to hundreds of thousands of people.

For the consumer, the only problem is that it’s a picture and not a warm, sensating person. When this picture is masturbated to, it’s an indulgence in the experience of entering that cosmic, metaprogramming bliss of orgasm and imprinting oneself with unfulfilled desire. Ejaculating at the behest of a sexy picture and your fist is not the same thing as letting go into a woman whose eyes see yours and affirm your existence as you surrender.

The feeling most men have when confronted with the resulting semen is nothing at all like the thirsty, sweet faced experience of their girlfriend eagerly swallowing it, or receiving him compassionately into her pelvis. One’s first impulse is typically to go running for paper towels. This sense of disgust with oneself while expecting others to be perfectly thrilled with you and/or your bodily secretions is encrypted in the whole message of pornography and its use.

Now, I recognize I’ve made a bunch of heterocentrisms here; my focus in this article is on male-female relating. I’ve assumed in my text above that women don’t look at chick porn, and they do. But let’s stick to one paradigm—men using pornography involving women. It’s rich territory. A lot of people are involved, and feelings, and cultural memes.

How we respond to pornography is extremely private. It’s one of the places were we strive to overcome the powerlessness of not being able to get the sex we want, and that powerlessness is a very sensitive space. If we bring porn here, in this space we can overcome some of that helplessness, we can exceed the bounds of the appropriate, we can transcend morality and imagine things that are difficult to arrange—such as having two or three lovers to play with at once.

Much like fantasy, porno is one of the places we seek the mental refuge of eroticism without complication. This is one solid reason why it’s a form of the prostitution which gave rise to it—the woman depicted in pornography becomes a figment of your imagination; she does what you want, when you want; she doesn’t give you any lip, set conditions or get her period. She doesn’t get pregnant and she doesn’t want to get married; at least not to you.

There is just one problem—she’s not really there. She cannot feel you and you cannot really feel her. You cannot really have her, but you can pretend. And deep in the honesty of orgasm, when someone lets go to the thought or image of her, is the feeling of surrendering to not having her and to not being felt by her. Pornography on this level is the erotic celebration of need, desire and rejection.

We do a lot of not having in our market-driven society, so we need this release, or this indulgence in an extreme form of not having. There are a lot of things we don’t get to own or do, and for those whose desire nature is alive and active, it’s clear that there are a lot of people we don’t get to have. Without going into a dissertation on the differences between male and female desire nature (and the ways we all express both), testosterone feels different then estrogen.

The urge to fuck her now, whether she wants it or not, is one of those little messages scripted into testosterone. All of human biology and sociology seem to make an allowance for this need, granting men an unusual degree of dominion over women; a certain generally accepted presumption of entitlement that can be invoked from time to time. Most men have little clue how to do this, however, and anyway, if you’re polite, you ask; and if you ask, you’re likely to face rejection many more times than acceptance. For most men this is a way of life; it comes with the territory. Hopefully the humiliation is worth it when you meet somebody who says yes—and hopefully not too much of that humiliation enters the room with you.

Patrick Califia-Rice, the former lesbian erotic writer and journalist who had a sex change, hooked up with another female-to-male transsexual and had a kid, described his early moments on testosterone. “My voice is deeper, and my sex drive has given me newfound empathy with the guys who solicit hookers for blow jobs,” he wrote recently in the Village Voice.

Despite rejection and so many blow job related scandals, desire lives on, and sexual need lives on. Though some could do it with a little more finesse, all men have to cope with, accept and somehow embrace the fact that they are not going to get to fuck all the attractive women they want. In truth most guys are going to fuck very, very few of them, which on one level is humbling and on another level humiliating; it seems such a waste. Lack of male finesse on this issue can translate to anger, resentment, or a redoubling of that sense of entitlement that so often goes at the top of the feminist rap sheet. Rejection is a direct invitation to push harder (some women consciously play this game). She must want it (sometimes she does); she’s playing hard to get (often she does); she will eventually give in (this often happens).

More to the point, she’s not going to approach you for sex, so you better approach her if you want anything to happen.

The guys who do have finesse might be inclined to be feminized, empathizing with the female condition and not wanting to impose or intrude on its sanctity. That generally does not lead to so much satisfaction, because women are conditioned to respond to assertiveness and a measure of arrogance. Besides, you’re a guy! You’re supposed to want her, and if you don’t she may blame herself. You’re supposed to know that she wants you, even though she would rarely admit it. And this is not just for romance. Plenty of women have fantasies of being fucked or eaten by guys, sometimes many guys, who just want them for sex and and don’t care otherwise. Many explore these experiences.

Such a lack of empathy is precisely what men get to play with when they apply male desire to porn. Rachel Asher, who wrote a piece in this series (to be published next week on Planet Waves), said that when she uses porn, it’s fun, but then she starts to empathize with the women who are depicted, such as how they feel about their job, or about putting themselves out there. I sincerely don’t think most guys have that problem. This denial of empathy is specifically one of the freedoms afforded to men when they use images of women in the form of pornography.

In these settings, men bring themselves to orgasm not having the woman respond to him, and not having to respond to her. And in this way, along with many other ways, we eroticize not having. Desire itself becomes the thing desired. The lack of fulfillment that so often confronts us becomes the erotic focus. For men using pornography, there is release, but the release is not received. Or if it is, it’s received by paper towels. Consider the thousands of gallons of semen mopped up every day, the direct product of pornography, and all the mixed feelings experienced in the moments after: from regret to remorse to guilt to some measure of at least physical satisfaction.

If porno is a celebration of denial, it may also be a celebration of desperation. It’s a craving for that form of refined (or is it crude) female sexuality that is so rare to find: the Sacred Whore who never says no, and who most men never get to meet. Or it’s just desperation in general to experience, feel or make a mark on this pristine thing we witness and call female.

WHAT IF we replaced that pornography with a mirror? I think that pornography is a mirror that men use to get off, but in that mirror they see a woman. They see The Other, exalted with a kind of purity: the pure whore; the one purely in touch with her desire nature. Her presumed job is to be the one who represents accepting male sexuality. The real woman in the picture may not be vaguely interested; she is a picture and can’t really do any accepting at all; we are talking about a symbol.

And the symbol is, she says it’s OK to want her and to let go. She serves a vital purpose: she accepts the inevitability of male sexuality, which is often experienced as unbridled lust and the need to ejaculate on every woman he sees.

There is an extreme form of pornography that I find interesting, called bukkake. It’s the Japanese word for pouring soup over your rice, and the porno culture word for a scene where a woman becomes the projection screen for cups and cups of semen, to which she becomes a kind of receptacle: men cumming over and over again on her body, into her mouth, onto a plate which she licks up, and so on.

The real woman is not available to a porn consumer, but she serves as a kind of mirror in the imagination; the symbol of the woman who takes it on. A common male expression for ejaculation is blowing one’s load. Load is equivalent to burden and it is the woman whose role it is to take on this burden, symbolically or in reality.

Imagine if we put an actual mirror there in place of the image of porn, and the guy masturbating had to be the one who did the witnessing; who encouraged himself to feel good and let go and receive himself. Given that usually this role is projected onto a female, he would likely need to contact his inner female to do that particular bit of service.

This whole ritual potentially evokes homophobia from the get-go. After all, a guy is watching him and he’s getting off to the image of a guy doing so. That is awfully queer! There is no stand-in for femininity; he has to find it in himself, or throw it off entirely and relate male to male. There is the implication of narcissism, or the reality. It’s not just a guy he’s getting off to—it’s himself! This is queerer than queer. It’s altogether easier to have a hot looking chick spreading her pussy lips for the occasion. Those pussy lips say, go ahead, it’s OK. I know what you feel. Feel it now.

But suddenly, when there is a mirror, there is a live human being available to do the empathizing. He just looks a lot like you. And the results of the experience stain the mirror. One cums onto the image of oneself, and that mark can remain there on the mirror, existing between oneself and one’s image of oneself. That self-image can be continually decorated, clouded, and seen as a constantly changing, developing image of oneself covered with the results of one’s own desire nature.

In many ways, this is the lens through which men look at women. And the influence is so strong that it’s the way that I think women see themselves: their reflection is seen and indeed searched for in a cum-coated mirror.

Yesterday, I photographed a 65-year-old woman looking into that particular mirror. Before we started the photo session, she said: “You have no idea how literally this reflects my experience.” She told me the story of working for a lawyer who was always getting his cock near her (while she was sitting and he was standing) and finally she came into work one day to find her keyboard and monitor covered with his semen.

Which from the point of view experienced by so many men is perfectly groovy, because someone else has to deal with it. And on this basis I say: skip the porn and get a mirror. Don’t clean it off. Let it accumulate, and associate your self image with what you see in that mirror. Give it a try—try seeing yourself as others may see you, or as others have to see themselves in the results of your feelings.

Would you clean up that mirror by licking it off? Or would that be too gross, too queer? If not, then you know exactly how your female partners are capable of feeling when they don’t quite want you that way, but receive you because they feel they must, or out of simple compassion for your need. And if you get to the point where you do clean it up that particular way, you will feel some of the emotional surrender that your female partners feel when they accept you that particular way.

The first thing you may have to encounter about your inner female aspect is that she doesn’t want you so much. She is alienated from you. But if you can form a relationship with her, and cultivate some mutual desire, you may be able to shift your relationship with women just enough to get some of what you need. At least you will learn to live with something about yourself that others also must live with, but which in the gleaming mirage of the male ego is often so conveniently denied.

It would have to be. Imagine a chief executive officer with a cum-coated shaving mirror on his desk, instead of a picture of his wife. It would not exactly command authority. Anyone who glimpsed in that mirror would see something too closely akin to the truth.

I HAVE ANOTHER fantasy, which is that every image of a woman depicted in porn have an inset photo of a man masturbating right next to it. This is a little like an actual mirror—only it’s worse, because it’s another man. We could take this a step further: the image of you is what’s going to be broadcast alongside the porn model, who is usually the only one exposed. You’ll appear in a pop up window, your face exposed.

The side of porn we see is specifically the model rather than what she inspires. The resulting male masturbation that is absolutely synonymous with pornography is the shadow side of the equation. There is a presumption underlying this: the shameless image of the woman is the vessel of purity, or of publicly accepted sexual corruption or shame (whores and porn models oddly stand for both). The shadow, male masturbation, is secreted away; masturbation is a closeted activity (and most of us prefer it that way, because when male masturbation is exposed, it’s pervy).

I suggest men claim this perviness. I suggest you claim it like queers claim queerness and the term queer. I suggest you put away your porn and trade it for a mirror, and never wipe it off. Look at it every day.

Imagine what it would be like for the women in your life, or the women you desire walking down the street, to see themselves in this reflection. Imagine if they could study you reflected there. Imagine that you see them all in this smeared image of all that you project.

Look at the mess we’ve made.

20 May 2008

When you see her

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Photo by Eric Francis.

WHEN YOU SEE a woman, who or what do you see?

What does she want you to see? And is there a difference? The difference is like the gulf between a porn model and the guy cumming onto her picture. Through doing these images of Book of Blue, it occurs to me that society has turned women themselves into porn.

We live in world made supposedly of one to one relationships. More accurately, women are the masturbatory objects of men. Does this sound harsh?

That is, out in the physical world. In the etheric, men are also the masturbatory objects of women. Many women, even those who appear the most conservative, have wild fantasy lives and do things in their imaginations they would never dare speak. Men allegedly need something printed with ink to get themselves going; women, being more sublime, require merely the printed word, the sound of someone’s voice for a moment, a glimpse of imagination and the Cone.

The thing about porn is that it doesn’t say anything. Everything it has, you bring to it. I would propose that as a definition of this highly elusive concept. The more nothing an image relates, the more it would qualify. By extension, we are conditioned to see the world and in particular women through this process of looking by projection.

The woman’s body, in many ways designed and outfitted by the glamor industry, is a sexually charged projection screen. One looks and fills in the story. She tends to be seen and see herself on the basis of comparison rather than inherent existence.

Similarly, women project onto themselves, often selfcreating themselves into a kind of mirage that does not match the substance of who they are. This helps us understand the kind of mixed signal that comes out when a woman spends an hour getting ready to leave the house, impeccably attending to the last detail of her appearance, and then resents that men notice her or that other women get competitive with her.

So if she tends to see herself by comparison, as do most other women, and he tends to see her by projection, then who really sees her?

This is an exquisite place to go exploring: the space of truly looking, of expressing curiosity, and of witnessing.

16 May 2008

Touching the Depth of Desire

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Daisy. Photo by Eric Francis.

WHEN I MEET A WOMAN who I find both beautiful and attractive, there can be that moment, a sinking moment, of knowing that I will never get to experience her. It’s a specific kind of powerlessness. I can feel it emotionally, and sexually (a highly focused, hormonally driven form of emotion). It can have exceedingly little to do with her, or who she is: it’s specifically about what I see and feel looking at her. I don’t know the truth of her feelings; the truth of her desires. I know she is either saying no or sending back that undeniable feeling of never.

It might not occur to me that I am wrong; that time or circumstances would change something. Desire is about now.

I now know I can go two directions with this feeling, this need. I can obsess over my desire, imagine having her, imagine her pleasure in response to my touch, my mouth, my penetration. I can imagine how my emotions and body respond to these things as well, how I feel her resonance with my pleasure and her yielding of resistance. She may not affirm my need, but she can submit to it. This is a kind of conquering desire, though the element of her pleasure seems to obviate this: obviously, if I like it, she would like it. Of course, this is not necessarily true, but it can feel true under the intense influence of pre-orgasmic emotion.

With certain women I have photographed, I can come tantalizingly close to their bodies, their feelings, their scent. I hear and feel them breathing. I notice the most exquisite details of their physical expression: the curves of their waist, the color and form of their nipples, the intricate details of their vulva. I notice the way their hair moves, and at times I can actually touch it with their permission, for example, to move it away from the eyes.

I watch their eyes watch mine as I photograph them, as I gently scale the surface of the boundary, holding back or being held back or perhaps suspended in radical acceptance, breathing consciously as I work, taking photograph after photograph not of a woman but of a woman I desire who does not want me, or who will not let herself want me.

When the game is overt it can be fun: a deliberate, energized tease on a playful level, with my desire acknowledged by their response. At times it can be a dark, malicious tease, the conscious use of power and her seeming to enjoy the process of saying no with her energy, and enjoying causing the pain of denial. Some of these images can seem on the verge of bursting open with energy.

Later, with long periods of time to review the images, their eyes can tell a different story than the one I was seeing at the time: I can see hurt, need, fear or passion mixed in with self-denial. I see the struggle for self-awareness or self-affirmation.

Yet in the end, the answer to the unspoken transaction is no.

I know this emotion is enough to drive many men insane with desire, or rage; in the past, it has driven me nearly to the point of unbearable yearning. Women experience deep desire, we all know this, but I know enough to know that there is something about how the need to penetrate her and pump her full of myself is something likely to be unique to men.

Being denied this is more than many men can stand, which is why we may push so hard to get what we want, no matter how strong the resistance or lack of desire from our counterpart. There can be an energy loop where the more I am not wanted, the more I want her. The more I need, the more she does not need me. If I express my need more, at least I am expressing, but that is always directing the energy outward. What I need is to take that desire inward, to accept myself fully in this condition; simply, to not deem myself worthless because she is not available or because I feel unworthy of her.

Through doing the work I do, I’ve learned there is another way to approach desire, which is to begin with never. I can look at a woman whose beauty evokes movement of deep emotional currents, I can feel that movement, and I can admit to myself that I will never have her. Indeed, I must admit this. I will never hold her, explore the texture of her hair or her pain, or press my face into her and smell her; I will never taste her, and she will never see my face letting go. She will have no direct consciousness of my sexuality, as I let it out of the container it’s now trapped in. I feel that, I surrender to that, I yield to it. I admit my need and the notion that it will never be fulfilled in the same gesture of thought.

I sometimes pick up on a dimension of their response: certain women can delay their gratification, sometimes for years; they can subvert their desire; a rare few can truly fulfill themselves through masturbation. My own masturbation to them may feel hollow, shameful, violative or disgusting. In them, there is no sense of yielding, and I can experience a profound sense of not being necessary. That at times can push me deep into myself, because there is noplace left to go.

I also recognize that other people will have her, she will share herself with them, open herself to them – and not to me. She may show up fresh from lovemaking with another man. Or she may show up in a state of frustration or dissatisfaction, determined to not let that get the best of her. Yet sooner or later, someone else will get to hold her, love her, fuck her, perhaps hurt her – but it will not be me. There are times when I would die for an up-close opportunity to so much as smell her cunt or her ass. It is easier, if I concede from the beginning that it will simply never happen. My own need is irrelevant.

16 April 2008

Book of Blue: An Inner Window

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Fae from Book of Blue. Photo by Eric Francis.

WE HUMANS have a complex relationship with the Mirror. In these strange devices, it’s as if we’re haunted by a spirit of ourselves peering in from another dimension.

Yet who is this mysterious Other, in the psychic sense? Is it an image of the ego? Is it an opposite rendition of who we are? Is the appearance of this other an invitation to make friends?

This is my basic philosophy—the Other is calling us; calling us home, into ourselves. It is perhaps our most complex journey through our most challenging relationship.

We all know that we can use relationships with others as a means of forgetting ourselves, or of avoiding a more direct relationship with ourselves. Yet even when we are totally subsumed in a partner, that mirror is there. Usually we catch a fleeting glance, or keep ourselves busy with makeup or our hair, never really relating.

We tend to respond to it as if we expect others to respond to us: as if we are not there. Our relationships with mirrors tends to be less like that of Narcissus in his pond, and more like an insect walking on the surface of water.

Book of Blue is a journey into ourselves, beneath the surface of the water, looking for the spirit in the mirror. My name is Eric Francis. I’ve photographed women searching their gaze in about 10 countries over the past three years. The photo above is Fae from New York State, who participates in Book of Blue projects on an ongoing basis.

Fae is 20, a Leo with a Gemini Moon.

7 April 2008

Book of Blue: A World Within Women

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Readers of the prior series, set in Vancouver, who are interested in the continuation, please write to me at egg -at -bookofblue.com.

I’ll reply if it’s clear that you were a reader of this series, which ran from December through mid-March and is now continuing.

BOOK OF BLUE began as a series of photos of women looking in mirrors.

One photo from an earlier stage of my work inspired the project, an image of my then-lover Maria Henzler created in Miami in the spring of 2000. This was one of the last photos in an earlier series called Luscious Photo, a more explicitly erotic project involving four models and two other photographers.

This photo of Maria haunted me in a stirring and evocative way; it entered my consciousness and would not let me forget its existence. In truth, the image and the experience of creating it with her put me in contact with something in myself that I did not know before. She was at that moment in a far-out erotic state, which was easy for her and natural to for her do around other people. In some ways she appeared to be reserved; in others, she could consciously enter a world with no borders at all.

I remember handing her the mirror so she could see herself. That is her gaze in the first seconds.

Empathy from that moment followed me for years, indeed, it took over as I slowly integrated it into every cell of my body through many experiences. The ability we learned, or discovered, to see ourselves absolutely unfettered, in the presence of one another, and to have that be photographed and seen by others, was for me a deep layer of freedom being made available.

With this came the ability to see without shame, and to look without judging the act of looking.

Many other hangups seemed to evaporate in the process. Something inside me gradually set itself free. Through the next phase of my life, something that had been choking me for a long time gradually loosened its hold.

Photo by Eric Francis.

FOR AS LONG as I remember, I have wondered what it was like to be, that is, to exist inside, the beauty that I perceived in women: the state of mind rather than body. From the outside, I would ache with the desire to make contact with what I saw and felt, as if it were separate from me.

As I developed the ability to communicate and mostly to listen, I began to figure out that what the women I knew, loved and yearned for were experiencing was often something other than I was seeing and feeling. This may be a gap that is more or less extant between all people; is there a way to really see through someone else’s eyes, or to feel through their feelings?

I would experience an exalted expression of humanity as a direct experience. They often perceived themselves as ordinary, and sometimes as striking and other times as plain or ugly.

Between the two states of mind there seemed to be a chasm that was not only wide, but incomprehensible and a little tragic. Getting to know women “as people” helped; certainly, that is demystifying. Yet it was still difficult to see through my perception and glimpse how she witnessed herself.

The question had begun to unravel with the Luscious Photo series. Three women I knew well and cared about deeply had been willing to participate in some exceptionally revealing photo sessions, often with mirrors present in the space. Photographing someone’s face masturbating or near orgasm (as opposed to play-acting, which we too-often see in commercial pornography) creates some transcendent images, but it has some drawbacks: for one thing, many women are at least initially reluctant to go there with a camera in front of them.

For another, it puts a sexual charge on the session from the beginning, something that does not need to be there. The Luscious Photo sessions were created by a small group of very willing friends; I wanted to do something that involved many more people and explored subtle states of mind that could be found around the edges of erotic awareness: states of self-awareness, what it would feel like to sense one’s existence, or to see a new vision of oneself for the first time.

Five years passed between the last of the Luscious Photos and the beginning of the Book of Blue. I was now working in digital instead of 35mm or medium format. I was also doing all of the photography, using much of what I had learned from my former collaborators, Neal and Maria, and what I had learned as their photographic model.

From the first sessions, there was a sense of discovery and adventure. Aimee, at the top of this post, was the first photo subject. She is a model and actor in Montreal. We did most of the photos outside, including some at the Canada Day parade with dozens of people watching as we worked.

The results were stunning: I felt like I could slip inside that space between what a woman looked like and how she saw herself. I could see expressions that were invisible looking directly at her without a camera or a mirror: the sensation of doubt, of searching, of discovery, and sometimes moments that looked like she was seeing herself for the first time. Some expressions looked like bewilderment and wonder; others seemed to be peaceful coexistence or self-acceptance.

In the photos, it often seems that thin, even transparent layers are dissolving gently, and the complexity of self-awareness is revealing itself in a way that seems to be mystical but is really human.

Photo by Eric Francis.

YOUNG WOMEN are intriguing, among other qualities, because the layers of their personalities are often packed so tight, it’s difficult to imagine they are there, including, it seems, for them. When someone “feels something but doesn’t know what it is,” especially about her own existence, that is what I would describe as the “packed layer” phenomenon.

As the Book of Blue photos progressed, those layers seemed to peel away gently. In witnessing women seeing themselves, I began to feel the ambiguity, the confusion and the quest for awareness that characterized so many of their psychic journeys. I gradually cultivated a quality in myself of holding space for this metamorphosis; of being as wide-open as possible when confronted with the awareness of another.

And I learned to look, and to see, both in the sessions and at the resulting work. In some images, I would see a child looking back. In the image of Nina, pictured above, I kept seeing a girl recognizing herself as a woman for the first time.

I can tell you that at this time in her life, Nina, the model above, was not truly comfortable being a woman. Being perceived as beautiful or desirable were alienating to her, and she seemed to struggle with the truth of being female, with its specific power, its attractive force, and the sense that she could not control the outcome if she let go into that quality of herself.

Here, she seems to be looking through a crack past the defenses of her self-perception, unsure of how to feel about it, but tentatively accepting the woman she sees.

Many people ask me about older women—where are they? There are some sessions in my files, and I’ll get to talking about them soon, with the photos. The age range of the project is currently 24 to 46. I love photographing older women; it is however generally the younger ones who show up.

I also get asked about where the men are; generally I’m the male subject of the series, though occasionally I work with others.

I BEGAN posting to Craig’s List when I visited someplace. Depending on the city, it was easier or more challenging to find models; the contrasts are always interesting. Sometimes the people who show up are professionals, other times, amateurs and often university students who wanted to model and were looking for a little extra cash. Others were friends or former lovers who wanted to do a session. Most possess what I consider real modeling talent, which is a kind of gentle sincerity and ease with the camera.

Mainly, the real art is how each reveals her beauty in her own way; with greater or lesser ease; being able to hold the space more or less comfortably; more or less selfconsciously. For many, a gradual seduction happens, as she works out the way she is going to reveal herself, and at times, her surrender.

Sometimes the models pose nude, others times they are dressed or partially dressed. Often I hear about the values involved in the choice to be dressed, or not, which lends insight into the face I am photographing. What surprised me at first was how willing so many women are to be photographed nude. I then began to figure out that it’s something of an archetypal desire to be photographed nude—something that many women think about, but relatively few do.

Sometimes the sessions venture into more adventurous erotic states. When they do, it’s usually a surprise, something that happens spontaneously, and it’s always got that feeling of it being not really possible, but actually happening. I focus on breathing and taking pictures.

With most models, the session and the conversation go on for several hours, so I tend to hear quite a bit about their lives, their relationships, their upbringings in places from Italy to Dubai, their sexual histories and preferences, and their sense of who they were or were becoming at the time. These are normally very secluded worlds, concealed even from lovers and therapists, sometimes revealed in diaries but often not for fear of being found out.

Through the sessions, there has been a phenomenon that recurs and is always intriguing. This is how the face looking into the mirror is at times so different than the one looking back out. Sometimes it seems like another person.

Whatever is revealed, one by one, women take my hand or take their own and walk us through their inner world, exploring their in-the-moment responses to their existence, and sharing as best they can some inner elements of their relationship to themselves.

When the model leaves, I am left misted in her presence, seduced, sometimes in love, always in a room doused in her psychic essence. And I have pictures that I can share with you.

10 February 2008

Looking & Seeing

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Iris. Photo by Eric Francis

IT IS in many ways taboo to look at women. True, they tend to go out of their way to be [in their terms] acceptable and [in my terms] beautiful. After so many hours, days and years of preparation, it is perhaps polite to glance at them, not so often polite to take a very good look and if one actually notices, one had best be subtle about it. Either that, or extremely bold.

I am reminded of the Greek myth where a mortal happens into some circumstance where a goddess is present, sees her nude, and is struck blind.

One of the most exquisite pleasures of photographing women is being able to look, and to see, with her direct consent. In a sense, it is a ritual of goddess worship: a conscious act of appreciation of a female and what can truly be called the Feminine. The ritual of witnessing the feminine is as much about their being seen as it is about my granting myself, and accepting, permission to see. The healing goes in both directions, because that is where the struggle went, too.

Has it been said recently that we humans NEED to be seen? We needed to be seen and acknowledged by our parents when we were young (and most of us were not). That carries into all kinds of needs to be seen and acknowledged as adults. If we hide the more often as we grow older, it only makes stepping into the light that much more emancipating.

Humans have a special thing about seeing themselves; we seem to look, a lot, and then act like it doesn’t happen. I mean visually; psychologically, we are nearly invisible to ourselves, but a physical mirror is a symbol. There is a split: we cannot usually be known for our self-awareness, or our self-curiousity, and we tend to hide things things from ourselves and others.

A passing glance, perhaps; but rarely deep indulging. Before a physical or a psychic mirror, generally one is alone. In a sense, the act of seeing oneself is the most secret that there is.

This is the space that is opened up by the camera and the mirror, the space directly entered. It is beautiful to see a woman seeing herself, in the midst of her unmitigated narcisissm, whether selfcritical or selfloving. It is a relief; it is the feeling of the universe meeting herself, acknowledging herself intimately.

There is a word for it: Compersion, the absolute acceptance of another person’s eroticism. Or, one’s own.

4 November 2007

An Hour with Sabrina

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One of the canals of Amsterdam, seen in 2005. Photo by Eric Francis.

THIS WAS my second meeting with Sabrina. Our familiarity and rapport were once again fresh and clear. I had picked her out of the ocean of sexworkers available on my first visit to the city because of that rapport: a psychological connection. I know this is like saying that you read Playboy for the articles, but it’s true. She did not lack for imposing beauty, but there is nothing if not beautiful women working the windows of Amsterdam. I related to her first through eye contact, and then the first time we spoke, I knew that she could reach me.

Unlike most of the girls in the city, she was actually Dutch. I knew she was not anyone’s property but her own. She took her work seriously and in time, from other conversations with other girls, I learned how well respected she was by her colleagues.

When I came back, she was the first place I went. She recognized me and remembered my name, which I thought astonishing, and from the warm feeling that rushed through me as she closed the door and pulled the faded red curtain, she felt genuinely welcoming. Nonetheless, I was her client, and happy to be one. We settled her pay; she asked for 200 euro for the hour, and I gave her 220.

Time is money in prostitution. The arrangement is structured. One thing about an hour is that it’s sufficiently short so that the more time you spend talking, the less you spend doing. But it is actually a workable amount of time to explore within. There is space to stretch out and have one or two experiences.

We caught up briefly on the events of the past six months since we had seen one another.

She instructed me to relax, and then handed me some of her weed and a pipe. I smoked a little, and it took me by storm; this was not ordinary cannabis; we were in Holland after all. The effect felt entirely natural, not like a chemical. The colors in the room all flushed gradually, and suddenly I felt so vulnerable for just being there that I could barely say a word. My eyes felt naked.

But what I was feeling was so strong, I thought she should be able to just read my mind.

“What do you want?” she asked. My hesitation before speaking felt like the most erotic moment of my life so far – that edgy anticipation before telling the truth, this truth, that I had carried into the door. Why should I care if she knew? Well, that was the game I was playing with myself.

She sensed my wavering and pushed me.

Choosing to speak with a deed rather than with a word, I dug into my bag and came out with an elongated hourglass shaped crystalline dildo.

She glanced at it with her dark eyes, and understood. I placed it on the towel I was sitting on, on her bed.

“And,” I said, pronouncing every word, “I want you to help me drink my semen.”

She smiled slowly. I watched her breathe, her slender diaphragm slowly pulsing and carrying her little breasts with it. I gradually looked up into her eyes.

“You’re like a girl,” she said. “You want to be fucked and drink semen.”

I nodded.

She got up and flicked the lights, leaving on only the black strip lights. Her white bathing suit glowed purple and the room was enveloped in see-through darkness. Everything light-colored glowed brightly.

“I think you need to strip and be on your hands and knees,” she said. I knew what was going to happen. I was planning to do it myself, and this pushed me to let go a little bit, to cede my control over to her and receive.

In the black light, her face was different, perhaps older but surely more mature. The maturity came in the expression of self-awareness she possessed.

I did as she asked and presented my ass to her. She snapped a glove on and lubed me generously.

I felt the cool smooth skin of the plastic press against me, and then into me, as if opening up a secret hidden space for the first time.

I really did moan, and she said, “Good boy.”

She knew what she was doing. She pushed me down, into myself, pushing a wide space open inside of me. I flashed for a moment to how many times she had been fucked in this very room, how many times she had given herself over in this same spot. But that thought got lost to the feeling of being pulled and pushed, reached into, and I could hear each of my breaths go closer to a moan, and then she would push me hard. Pockets of hot emotion would stretch and come close to bursting free. I was being stretched into submission and – utterly embarrassed.

She did this with the feeling that she would never stop. Periodically she would tell me to look up and face the mirror on the wall along the bed. Each time I looked, my face and my psyche appeared increasingly unraveled.

I felt like I was filling up inside. The bulb of the dildo massaged the bulb of hot fluid that had gradually collected inside me. I wanted to feel it crush and burst. Then she somewhat abruptly told me to stand up. As she walked me toward the mirror, a rectangular mirror set above a high vanity shelf with her makeup on it, she continued to penetrate me as I stood. I stood looking at myself, as she had planned.

This was clearly intended to induce orgasm. I felt drunk at the edge of a cliff. I was clinging to myself and I could barely stand up.

“Shall I give it to you, or will you do it yourself?” She was really asking me. I listened to the question and thought for a moment.

“I want to do it,” I said.

With that, she swirled the dildo, pushing it a little deeper as my face melted into itself. She found the hot spot inside me. My need to orgasm while not buckling at my knees was sweet, taut suspension of myself. She seemed to be holding me up with the object impaled in my ass, which went deep into my body and extended out the front.

I caught a glimpse of my face the moment before the warm jets took me. Then we were both looking into my free hand, her face near mine as I shook and groaned as each spurt of semen reached out and pooled upon the next, filling my palm up easily.

I had a moment of disbelief as I realized she could hear the sounds I was making. Then I stepped outside myself, and was watching myself standing there, my bare feet on the cool marble floor, blowing my load into my hand as she carefully supervised.

Then I did it. Looking at her face rather than at myself, standing as if I had just been hit by lightening, I inhaled quickly from my nose, gathering my grassy sent. A moment swung like a pendulum before I skimmed the contents of my hand into my mouth, filling it. Then her hand grasped mine and pressed it into my face, coating my whole face with my sticky, fertile liquid that lit up like a purple mask.

“You’re not taking that off before you leave,” she said as a cool feeling enveloped my cheeks and my forehead. “Look into my eyes and swallow.”

I stood there panting and swallowed, unable to imagine the look on my face but deeply comforted by hers. Not entirely forgiving; a slightly strict face, but compassionate. Still penetrated, still held in her hand, she walked me backwards toward the bed, and pushed me down. I rolled onto my back and drew up my legs. She held me at my center and slowly deepened the penetration as we locked eyes.

“You want to drink it straight from your cock as it’s spurting, don’t you,” she said, somewhat accusingly. “But you can’t. You’re desperate, though.”

She was examining me in her hand. With the other hand, she fucked me in a gentle rocking motion that gradually built momentum.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

“It began with my dreams,” I said, panting the words gently. “I would wake up to the sensation of swallowing my cock, and ejaculating. The feeling of self penetration was deep and real and I could taste my ejaculation. When I woke up I was actually ejaculating, usually onto my belly. But I never wanted to drink it after that happened. You are right, I began to get desperate.”

“And so you use women to make it easy.”

“That’s what I do.”

“It’s a pleasure. I am now going to wash your dildo.”

My heart thumped in terror, and she withdrew the bulbed thing from me quickly, looked at it, and walked to the sink. I felt empty and set free.

I felt like if moved my face, it would crack. I knew I would be walking out into the street that way, and accepted this situation quietly. The feeling of just having swallowed my orgasm was still full in my mouth, soaked in my scent and lingering in my throat. I could feel the experience coursing up and down my body, mingled not quite with regret, but with disbelief at what I had just done. Sabrina ran the water at the sink.

MY TIME was up. In fact I had gone five minutes over, and she said it was time to dress and leave. She handed me my sex toy and I put it away, and dressed as she reset her space for her next client. She had excellent boundaries that way and unlike some girls who complained about not getting clients, she said she earned as much as the prime minister, at 22 years old. Sabrina is a Capricorn, by the way – so it’s a funny analogy.

She walked me to her door, and pulled open the ancient red curtain. It all seemed over very quickly. But before I stepped outside, she placed me in the window where she usually stood. In fact, she took hold of my shoulders and put me there.

“This is my street corner. This is what I see all day,” she said.

I watched as the men strode by and stared at me – it must have been extremely odd to see a man in the window. I stood there and felt what it meant to be looked at by these less than compassionate faces, faces that merely wanted what they wanted and who planned to give as little as possible.

“May I take some pictures?”

“Sure you may,” she said. I quickly had my camera out and began photographing the scene out of her window. Her reflection was behind me. I thanked her, turned around and embraced her, and stepped out onto the crowded early evening streets, feeling like the whole story of what had just happened was painted onto my face, or rather, knowing that it was.

5 October 2007

An Art or Nothing Moment

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Prudence White in Brussels studio space. Photo by Eric Francis.

WHAT EXACTLY is sexual art? Oh, we usually use the words ‘erotic art’, but I am this evening declaring them a euphemism. Or perhaps there is a difference. Maybe erotic art includes the depiction of something directly sexual. But sexual art is something where sexual alchemy went into the creation.

Here is the story of the tee shirt.

We met again some months later. She did not want to pose nude or topless. Or perhaps she did, but she was adamant in a way that made me proud of Austria. She also knew this would be disappointing, since we both knew I wanted to see her nude and planned to make some fun pictures while doing so. I am sure she got a jolt from the power of saying no. I did.

Yet I am sure our desire was in the same place – and her resistance (she said, “I am a prude”) could have extinguished the daring quality that photos need. I have leaned to work with resistance rather than against it. This was an art or nothing moment. I slipped into my room and came out with a new white tee shirt and sharp scissors. I placed them on the black tabletop and suggested she make herself a garment. She snipped away at the thin cloth for a few moments, stepped into the bathroom and came out looking like she was wearing a smock. The shirt kind of dangled off of her like a 3-D female clothes hanger.

Then she started playing with it, just as the light turned sweet. The shirt became a living thing, relating to her consciously. In truth, it was her puppet, and she could make it do anything. What it was going to do was present, display and engage with her breasts. With this boundary, she could expose herself.

Okay taking the photos was fun. It was also agonizing because the tension we were walking on was between me and her tits, but she was in command. Further, she had confided in me two explicit details of her habitual masturbation at the end of our first session. So I had that imagery in mind, and the vision of her face saying the words to go with it. I don’t think she intended revealing this to torture me. Maybe she just needed to share.

As a model, she did what she wanted. In other words, she did not need direction; I just followed her with the lens as she went about her motions, took a call, smoked a couple of cigarettes.

As she moved around and occasionally talked, she kept stretching the shirt in a myriad of directions. She would not reveal her nipples or areolae. She played an interesting game that I didn’t see till I was looking at the photos, which was to flirt as closely with revealing herself as she could, but without actually doing so.

The word for this is psycherotic. It is a kind of mental interplay between oneself and an experience, or play between two people, that is an intimate psychological mingling. Oh, and visual, because photography is just about all about looking and seeing – and showing. This particular showing came in the guise of concealing herself.

One result was, looking at the photos later that night and in the days after, I was gradually obsessed by her breasts and also by the woman who was engaging with them. I cannot say I liked her, but I felt deep, swirling compassion for her. I was in her world, I knew and understood her as the feelings fluttered through her psyche. I felt her slip on doubt and gradually get her footing again. Her face told the story. And that daunting, tentative beauty could send my mind reeling into pulses of surrender.

I think it’s fair to say she claimed not to like her breasts, and her reluctance to reveal them bare may have involved the fear that they are too small. In the process, she created pictures that make one’s heart thump a few times, and that exalt breasts, hers and those of all women.

3 September 2007

The Celibacy Goddess

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Iris, holding her gaze in the oval mirror. Photo by Eric Francis.

PHOTOGRAPHS are not reality; they are the symbol of reality. Yet they create a “reality” of their own. Alice A. Bailey says many times in her writing that there is an entire dimension of [non]existence which we could call glamour. We think of glamour as being something good, or fun, or beautiful—as in glamourous, how wonderful!

The thing about glamour is that it has a certain, well, the word often used is allure…yet we know it’s not real. Photography is often involved.

Bailey describes what we think of as glamour as being a reduced form of a much larger problem: we create a fake world, and then we try to live in it. She calls this the “world glamour,” the creation of an entire sphere of [non]reality that includes the media, much of what we think and much of what our senses perceive, and which has no grounding in reality.

To see this in action, make art—and to some degree, succeed well enough to know you have created an alternate reality: an image that was not there before, a character that did not exist, a scenario that takes on a life of its own.

The thing about art is that it’s either done with very focused intention (I tend to trust artists inherently, because they live to focus beauty), or it is done in a process of surrender that brings one into contact with one’s creative core; and this, too, is supremely trustworthy. In these situations, alternative realities can be a lot of fun and teach us an enormous amount about ourselves, and show us how to see life a new way. Alternative realities can teach us to create reality.

We don’t often use our creative power to make the world we actually want, or even the one we need—rather, we typically create a kind of grey astral world (of polarized emotions, for example, a hallmark of the astral plane) that we don’t quite want (but seem to be hooked into). We can create whatever we want; all it takes for something to happen is enough people to decide it’s going to happen, and sometimes that means just one or two.

We have another issue entirely when the power of art is turned to greed or deception. It loses none of its force, indeed, it seems to focus energy and reach us as deeply or more deeply. It turns out that “glamour” is part of this process—making evil things look good, for example, or exposing people to beauty so that you can sell them what they don’t want or need.

Glamour is typically a world of unfilfilled desires, fantasy projections we are often too scared to experiment with in reality, or too embarrassed to admit. Yet it reminds us, in a backwards way, that we have the capacity to create and imagine, if we notice what we are doing.

I think this is the most glamourous photo I have ever taken. I had no plans of making it that way; I don’t even remember the shot, specifically—it’s one of a series. Yet clearly something comes through, or rather someone, Goddess-like. I keep getting the feeling of Athena. In that sense, it’s not glamour we are seeing here, but rather a glimpse of the Goddess-essence carried in that moment by one woman. Or perhaps that is glamour.

She who is depected here is morphing into a fictional character, based on her inaccessibility: the Celibacy Goddess. She doesn’t have a name, but she has a feeling. The cool athenian gaze and face that to me seems so Greek, that is the face that you don’t get to see cumming for you.

To me, she is a ritualistic mirror in which I must stand alone, and acknowledge at least the potential that no act of sexual communion can give me the self-completion I seek when I look into her face. And in a way, her flawless female reflection is the symbol of that completion as it already exists within me, if I can reach the point where I feel as inwardly beautiful as she appears in sensorium.