A Blurring of Genres

On the forums, I've noticed that more than a few shooters sometimes seem preoccupied with categorizing, labeling, and defining the various genres that comprise the gamut of pretty girl shooting. That's why I like the simple and direct term, "pretty girl," when defining an image of, well, of a pretty girl captured in some evocative way.

The rise of digital photography has increased the general population of people, mostly guys, shooting women in various ways: Glamour, art nude, boudoir, portraiture, and beyond. Quite often, it's difficult to categorize a pretty girl image as being, purely, a part of one genre or another. The lines that differentiate the various categories of pretty girl pics keeps getting blurred. And frankly, who cares? Is it glamour? Fashion? Art nude? A bit of all of those? What does it matter?

Bottom line-- It's a great image, a mediocre image, a completely forgetable image, the model is easy to look at, not-so easy to look at, and so on. Sometimes, I purposely attempt to capture models while borrowing from multiple genres. I like to steal from differing styles, whether through lighting, pose, whatever. In my opinion, it's all good if the resulting image is good and I'm not too concerned whether the image fits neatly into one category or another.

I often see new shooters (or those new to pretty girl shooting) posting pics with a title in the subject line like, "My First Attempt at Glamour." Sure enough, some more experienced pretty girl shooter comes along and comments, "That's not really glamour." Personally, I don't think the newbie (pretty girl) shooter was all that interested in learning if his image perfectly qualifies as "glamour" as much as he was interested in hearing if others think it's a decent capture.

The term "glamour" has radically evolved into something other than what it originally intended. Today, "glamour" is a politically-correct way of describing images that are sexually-charged while depicting models in various stages of dress and undress. I think glamour pioneers like George Hurrell understood the "sexually-charged" elements of their images, but the times in which they lived and worked dictated something different in the the way in which their subjects were presented. (Note: I wanted to link the official Hurrell site, www.hurrellphotography.com, but it doesn't seem to be working. I don't know if that's temporary or what.)

Today, especially with the public's easy access to pornography, images that would have once been categorized as "soft core porn," or worse, raise fewer and fewer eyebrows and seem perceived as being "softer" than ever before... soft to the point they are now called things like "glamour images."

Everyone, it seems, doesn't see the current iteration of glamour as being so innocent. One major publisher of today's brand of glamour pics is apologetic for the content of the images they publish.

According to the NY Daily News, "Sports Illustrated's racy swimsuit issue is being kept off library shelves across the country."

This didn't happen because libraries were objecting and censoring SI's "racy" content in their annual swimsuit edition. It's because Time-Warner, SI's parent corp, decided NOT to send the swimsuit issue to 21,000 "institutional subscribers" last month. In a world where hard-core porn--and a lot of it--is so easily accessed with a couple of keystrokes, who would have thought the publisher of a magazine featuring bikini shots would be overly concerned about certain segments of the public's reaction to their very soft, yet fleshy, content? BTW, more than a few librarians objected to SI's act of self-censorship and SI has devised a way in which libraries can receive the swimsuit issue which they paid for with their subscriptions.

The sapphic pretty girl image at the top is of Lorena and Selena. I guess it's glamour. Hmmm... maybe it's soft-core porn? Like Rhett Butler once told Scarlet, "Frankly, I don't give a damn."