Photography in the News, Incessant Hack Edition

To be said in best Inigo Montoya voice: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Look, there's a long tradition relating to installation art. It means something. It's not just a word you can slap onto hackwork and expect it will improve it.

Spencer Tunick keeps doing the same thing. Over, and over. Often, when an artist does that, the work grows in context and gets deeper, more meaningful, getter. Not in this case. It's just the same thing over and over, and it becomes less interesting each time. Except he's taken to calling his snapshots "installations."

Tunick's work is now less remarkable than a Geico ad, and twice as annoying. I've written about his always-the-damn-same work previously, and I guess I can stop hoping it will ever stop, grow, improve or vary in the slightest.

Nude volunteers needed for Opera House strip

"New York photographer Spencer Tunick is looking for thousands of Australians to disrobe in the name of art on the steps of the Sydney Opera House."

I Am Third

If you google for "backside photographer" -- and why wouldn't you? -- you will find that this blog is now the third highest result. "Backside Photography" turns up the seventh highest result.

Ah, the sweet smell of, umm, something.

Which means we need a new motto: New York Portraits: For All Your Backside Photography Needs.

Fidel and Raul Unavailable For Comment

Of course, now that the Backside Photographer is in the public imagination, we have to ask: could he (or she) simply be misunderstood? Is Backside Photography acceptable for either fun or profit?

Let's see if we can learn anything from recent cultural news coverage:

The Strokes' 'Is This It' cover model revealed

'The model whose backside adorns the British cover of The Strokes’ 2001 debut album, ‘Is This It’, had revealed how the famous image came about.

In a new video posted online by influential blog Goldenfiddle, the model explains that the photoshoot was spontaneous, and happened after she came out of the shower of photographer Colin Lane, her then boyfriend, naked.

"I walked out of the shower and I was completely naked," she recalls. "I was walking around the house – he was like, put this glove on. I walked over, boom, that was the shot."

Well, that's perhaps a bit too Spinal Tap for some. But what about serious artists of the kind you read about in The New Yorker? Are they involved in any Backside Photography these days?

REAL NAKED LADIES

Renting a studio at Chelsea Market—“I didn’t want them to have to climb up creepy stairs to some weird place”—and decorating it, like a wedding reception, with lilies and refreshments, Roth shot the women in various states of undress and girl-bonded giddiness. (Coincidentally, there was another shoot taking place at Chelsea Market, requiring an entirely different morphological profile: lingerie models.) Her own backside, distinguished by a birthmark shaped like Cuba, made a cameo in a series of shots she refers to as “the jiggly butt sequence.” But after the terrorist attacks Roth shelved the film. “It just seemed like this frivolous naked-lady project right after 9/11,” she said.

It may be then that Backside Photography is acceptable if the timing is right.

So don't be surprised when the Backside Photographer shows up with a blog, a book, and a show in Chelsea. You just know that's next.

Photography in the News

Sure, we've seen this basic People Paparazzi story before. Several times before.

But this time it's in the Wall Street Journal, so now it can be considered a business model, and WSJ readers will spend their long, long lunches pondering how to make it into a synergistic monetization initiative with a cute name and flashy Web presence.

The Rise of the 'Citizen Paparazzi'

'As it turned out, she got even more contact with her favorite singer than she expected: Mr. Mayer, hamming it up for fellow passengers, donned a neon green thong-style swimsuit as Ms. Horgan and others furiously snapped photographs. In a blog post after returning home, Ms. Horgan joked that she was going to send the pictures to celebrity magazine Us Weekly.

'She didn't have to. Within days, Ms. Horgan heard not only from Us Weekly, but also from MTV, VH1, Rolling Stone, Blender and Newsweek. She ended up selling photos to Newsweek and VH1 – she says she was offered "a couple hundred" for each photo, but declines to be more specific.'

Of course, I have no idea what will happen when the WSJ reports their version of this story:

UCF Police Warn Of Backside Photographer

"Investigators want University of Central Florida students to be on the lookout for an illicit photographer. A student told police he saw videos online of women's backsides as they walked around campus. He recognized some campus landmarks in the shots."

I'm afraid to think what businesses might be launched the next day.

One question on the "Backside Photographer" story: can that student really be sure they were all women? Perhaps one of them was wearing something neon green on his way to give a concert on campus?