From the Vault of Art Shay: Let's Talk About Sex
By Art Shay in News on Jul 18, 2012 6:00PM
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon inspires Art to dig for some erotic shots.)
Some lucky writers, artists and Hugh Hefner, can casually array the bricks of sensuality and the disorderly mortar of idolatry, dissipation and buffoonery so that the reader-observer-consumer (shrinks tell us) believes he or she is being let-in on every voyeur's unspoken wet dream: watching other people do it; having comparable images in mind of our own pitiful or glorious sexual adventures. In these lucubrations, we hope we are doing it right and make corrections next time out. (That is, in.) Sexy photography is a whole ‘nother thing. When it's good you don't quite know why, but you like it. When it's bad —just like bad writing—it's amusing.
What brings this conundrum to mind and drove my assistant and archivist Erica deep into the Sex Department of my archives is my inability to stop laughing as I try to read the first of E L James's dirty trio of books— Fifty Shades of Grey and the like—numbers 1,2 and 3 on the New York Times' Book Review list. In fairness I must say that the reviews have been good enough to spur sales to numbers equal to the populations of medium-sized republics. The plot, told in the first person by an upper middle class working girl, is simple. She accidentally meets a rich, dynamic, beautiful, pervert executive who is into submissive consent: spanking; whipping; biting; hot wax; genital clamps; nipple clamps; fisting; bound knees; paddling and icing areas that even Filthy Philomena (the Mafia castoff in our Bronx neighborhood) would think awry. This gorgeous monster works up a Bain-type contract and our feh lady has to decide whether to sign. To spur her along he climbs into bed "and takes his socks off individually." Ah meen this here is writin' the equal of the four legged beastie stuff. He's warmed her up by saying, “I knew you were inexperienced, but a virgin?” He says it like it's a real dirty word... he groans.”May God forgive me. Have you ever been kissed, apart from by me?"
While readers try to translate "Have you ever been kissed, apart from by me?" I'd like to refer you normally canted sexual readers to the latest non-pirated iteration of the sneaky nude picture I made of Simone de Beauvoir in 1950, as the New Yorker would say, “by, of all people, an American—the photographer Art Shay—in, of all places, Chicago, where Beauvoir was canoodling bilingually with Nelson Algren." This is a base canard, because Nelson canoodled in but one language.
But you get the idea. Writer Adam Gopnik got carried away and mentioned Henry Miller canoodling with Anais Nin, then French President Nicolas Sarkosy canoodling with his new spouse, nude Italian model Carla Bruni. He got Mick Jagger and Donald Trump in the piece and had a nice lede: “Earlier this month, France was disrupted by the image of a woman both sexually alive and politically relevant-defiant and proud and threatening." But then Gopnik got carried away and expatiated in fiction that Nelson was so proud of his French conquest that he hired me to take his Madame's picture, inferring it would be a trophy of the Gallic conquest by a simple Chicago soul.
Oh well it ain't as bad as "being kissed, apart from by me." (Note to myself: Of All Places, Chicago. Possible title for a book.)
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.