26 July, 2008

Fine Art 101

First among the bits I'll put up of my work with other artists is credited to Barbara Nitke. Today's are from her advertising portfolio. I am in a few of these (we have given me the designation "Macground" since I am mostly just presence), but my in-frame co-conspirator and the person to whom you will be giving most of your attention is model and actress Ming Jin. Her devastating make up is by Khush Singh. This set was inspired by the film Lust, Caution, and we shot against the most elegant cargo elevator in NYC.


Barbara and I have been working collaboratively for years on several of her portfolios, and whenever she envisions rope being included as an element in her pieces, no matter how little, we link up. We often seem to end up with more bondage than might have been originally intended (and I frankly can't tell in the end who among us (models included) is responsible for failing to rein it in) but the results have been uniformly fabulous.

Barbara is not a practitioner of rope, but she is a long-time student of BDSM who intuitively understands the same thing I do about its efficacy in collapsing perceptions of space and difference between partners in a scene. Her last book, Kiss of Fire, is is a great chronicle of BDSM in NYC before it came above ground, and reveals Barbara's talent for capturing the spiritually humane, some have even said religious, import of BDSM.


I may say more about these and other of Barbara's pictures I'll post here, but for the time being I'll just let the images do the talking (and the first thing they'll tell you in no uncertain terms is that Barbara owns the copyrights).


Well, I will add that what you're looking at are the raw images, un-retouched by Barbara's considerable expertise in that department. Of the very few images that will actually enter her portfolio these may or may not be among the elect. From this particular shoot, however, these are among my favorites and representative of my continuing interest in Barbara's project.

3 comments:

Asobime said...

Beautiful, beautiful model and photography...

And were those Texas boots??

Talk about Power!

Jane

Mac K. said...

Hi Jane,

I'm sure Barbara will see your kind comment.

Actually, those are dance flats I had made for me in Lisbon. I'm not sure what they do for me power-wise, but I do think they make me a better dipper. :)

For boots, I'll have to show you my Justins (from Austin) sometime...

Mac

M.Yu said...

Nice set Mac. Barbara does very fine work.
The sincerity comes through. That is what effects me the most.