cimorene

this was sparked by the miniwank here. (ETA: link fixed)

taradiane posted this picture of daniel radcliffe.

wayfairer said the childsploitation made her uncomfortable and asked for a cut-tag. lots of people took offense and/or got snotty. the lady protested too much. no one ELSE was bothered by the childsploitation. he's just a kid; kids crouch in that position all the time. was she some kind of sicko, getting turned on? etc etc etc. she was uncomfortable with the suggestive pose; they denied there was one.

let's put it this way: the suggestive composition. that picture is designed to draw the eye to daniel's crotch.

it's not that the photographer necessarily made a crotch bull's eye and lined dan up in front of it; it's that no artist, no professional photographer, lines up a shot unaware of what he or she is doing. photographers look through the viewfinder, and they don't see just "kid crouching on pedestal with caterpillar brows": they see the image of lines and colors and highlights and dynamics that is going to exist in the photograph. they don't see the person--they see the work of art.

let's study how this works.

we'll start with something very easy.

unless otherwise noted all images are winners at winners at art renewal dot org's salon competition for modern artists

this is a landscape painting, very simply rendered, with the details deliberately blurred. look at it and ask yourself where you start looking, and how your eye travels through the picture, picking up details. there are several factors that influence your eye, but they mainly have to do with highlights--the lightest, or the highest contrast, will draw the eye right away--and with the lines making up the picture. your eye doesn't skip around like a bouncy ball. it follows the lines. it does this in candid photographs, in the mona lisa, in LJ icons, in website layouts, in this painting, and in pinup (and non-pinup) posters of stars like daniel.

here's my markup of the picture. the highlights are circled; the main path of the eye is drawn in red arrows. secondary highlights are a darker, browny color. the pink arrows are where your eye goes after it reaches the ends of the red arrows; the purple arrows are tertiary.

see? how about another easy one?

came up in a google image search for 'avocado' i did last week

that extra, brighter yellow circle is pointing out the likeliest starting point for your eye in the picture. it's also quite likely you'd start with the avocado, stay riveted for a bit, then follow the pink arrows out and the red arrows back in. the path of the eye in pictures is always circular--it starts at the main points and gradually takes in the less interesting things until it's grabbed all the details it wants, and got back to its starting points; then it follows the red arrows again.

here's another person:

in that one, all the highlights are concentrated at the center of the image, and the contrast is very high. it's hard to make yourself focus on the details of drapery around the girl at all. notice how that purple fabric forms the bottom part of a wedge shape whose point is her head again. from there the eye goes straight back down to the pitcher.

here's one with an X-shaped composition--that is, strong diagonal lines meeting in the center. the picture of dan has the same composition.

a google image search on 'lemon lime'

your eye goes straight to the two leafy lemons in the center.

here's one penultimate one. for one thing, i really love this picture. for another, it's got one HUGELY powerful dominant line of movement, which makes one fewer than in the picture of dan. of course, once you've slithered down the one your eye is left looking for others, and the journey through the background is unusually complex.

same drill: highlights and secondary highlights; main line, secondary and tertiary lines. ~~lookit her wee toe!~~ what the marks don't really emphasize is that the serpentinish wedge-shape of highlights down the side of the model's body is the real center of the picture. the side of her face, her arm and breast, her hip and the side of that one leg, all form a wedge between the pink and red lines. that wedge is nearly impossible to tear your eyes from. the real center is her breast--partly because it actually is in the center; partly because of the contrast, with the lighter highlight and the dark nipple; and partly because of the lines pointed out by the red and pink arrows which point to it. the nipple is where the eye ends up, which is why there are a red and a pink line which point away from it as well as the ones which indicate it. the ones following the sides of the central wedge/model's body are probably where your eye goes first, but it doesn't take it long to wind up at the nipple.

now, the picture of dan isn't so simple as the citrus one; it doesn't have diagonals which lead STRAIGHT to the center. here's my marked version:

the eye starts at his face. it's light, it's round, it's positioned high and centrally, and the face is the natural starting point on a person. a line leads down the center of his chest to his crotch. the slopes of his shoulders, another route from the face, lead to secondary highlights... and from there take you to the thighs. lines go from knee to crotch too. and the slices of arm are symmetrical and form a sideways hourglass there where they're cut off by his sleeves and his thighs--the arms are the bottoms of it, and the center is his stomach. you notice the ACTUAL center is his stomach. why does the eye go down? probably it has not yet explored the bottom of the picture this early in the game. when it encounters the vertical central line, then, it will quite likely go down and not up. also, there's an arrow-shape, rather high-contrast, made by the white negative space between his knees. that arrow points to the crotch; the eye follows an arrow, or a wedge, from the wide to the narrow part. and finally (although i've shrunken the picture so it's harder to tell), there are very subtle highlights--the gold thread/seams of his jeans, at the bottom of the fly and the center of the legs, make wee dots, and the inner leg seams are also very faint arrows leading to these points. the crotch is the focal point.

what it means that his crotch is the focal point of the image is up to individual interpretation. i'm not calling it childsploitation, but i think you'd have to be nuts to say it wasn't suggestive. not shouting--but CROTCH-->SEX is a quite natural leap, and not a very long one, in my book.

*well, one might say peace sign-shaped.