let’s talk about pirelli 2010 (1)

first thing to make clear for those who don’t know me very much is that i love nudity pictures. one of my future goals as a researcher is to study representations of body and also to distinguish erotic nudity from porn nudity at its different degrees. which doesn’t mean i may not appreciate porn in some cases. i am actually interested in representations of sexual nudity out of heterosexism. so, what i mean now, my negative review of 2010 pirelli calendar is not because of puritanism or feminism.

my negative opinion is first of all because of a sense of disappointment towards photographer terry richardson, the author of the calendar. he is a very trendy photographer, one of the most sought of at the moment. yet, while i have loved his ironic provocative raw xxx-shots and his fashion editorials done in collaboration with vogue paris stylists, i definitely think he gets lost when he should stay at a less strong level than pure representation of sex. let’s say he can’t shoot erotism, he can only shoot sex. his imagery is pornographic.

at this point we should have a definition for what erotism is and for what porn is. i don’t think i am so good with those definitions yet, but for sure it seems that while erotism is more like a promise of sex, a hint at something-to-come, a game between veiled and unveiled, shadow and light, reality and mystery, porn is a matter of sexual evidence. from the highest degree of genital close-ups to the softer degree of imitations of sexual acts (for instance with particular positions or phallic objects), porn seems to deal with explicit contents. again, i am not saying eros is good, porn is bad. and those look like the extreme concepts, then you may get a mixture of eros and porn.

going through the many editions of pirelli at their site – as i have done with pleasure a few times – you get it that pirelli has steadily done with erotism more than with porn. even in those early years when it was aimed to tuckers and mechanics, there was more a promise of sex than a representation of it. that doesn’t mean it was always classy, cos i see ppl tend to confuse erotism with class and elegance, which isn’ true. erotism may be trashy too and partially early pirelli was.  so, if 2010 calendar was aimed to recover the spirit of early pirelli, it’s a failure. cos this year we have porn, not eros. this year we have richardson.

failure comes from another point too though: not only this calendar is soft-porn with its use of phallic objects and poses of butts and bodies ready to be penetrated, instead of being erotic as in the pirelli tradition, but it’s also a poor pornographic thing. lack of ideas is evident: there is a sense of repetition, of random, of boredom. there is no sexual joy in those pics, but like it is like a gallery of naked young women pretending to be joyful and ironic. that leads to a further point, concerned with the young age of the girls, but i will talk about it in the next post. for the moment let me say that one of the best things in terry’s porn shots is their life, like sex is exploding in the pics, be it joyful or just miserable. that’s the realistic porn i love in terry. here it’s not fish neither flesh. it’s just a full lack of ideas and pics don’t create any representative system. i remember last year i was rather negative at 2009 calendar too (apart from daria’s sub-calendar that was great), but at least there was an idea behind, pictures were linked in an authorial project. here there is nothing of it.

so result is a poor clumsy porn with an additional disturbing lolitic effect i will deal upon next time!

Advertisement