Course in Photographing Intimacy for a Digital Generation Desensitized by Nudes

First know: everything’s a lens. I mean a film. I mean your skin seems warm, but isn’t uniformly so. I mean it’s a flimsy thing that separates a surface from the hurt and roil. Easy to believe at first that it’s the nude that means: the camera zooms & hovers over you like a drone. What I mean’s meniscus, the line between being and beginning thinning the more I think about it. I mean skin’s a screen that registers all stimuli, however slight: how not just what you think you’re photographing gets captured. It all registers: the infant’s breath in the next Starbucks over as she pivots, mid-shriek, from anger to laughter as someone slips a lace and falls. The catalogue of lower back tats you’ve known, or how a safety razor drags along a cheek, scraping sweat, and snaps. I mean a lot more light lands than you realize & film can’t catch it all. It makes an impression: the sudden summer hail on hoods, the sexy tintypes in the gallery, all the selfies catching all of the reflections on all the surfaces add up incrementally.

Haha, we get it, teach. You fear our hearts and heat and indecision. It’s not like nude’s the only thing we know. If we’ve traded love for information and feedback loops the expert system buried in our voice recognition app mentors us better than you ever could. It knows enough to listen before it opines. Forget what you said before.

Your Camaros know hard surfaces remember their collisions longer than skin can. It’s like desire never scarred you into being.

I bet if you still yourself enough you can feel your own atomic trail as it degrades across your instrument.

What does it feel like to watch it fade?

It’s indecent, its descent, unaided, naked, a streaking bomb in a game of Missile Command, now decades old. Now it only runs on the emulator. When were you ever brave?

If it’s become lame to say these things are beautiful then I quit. But not for long: you can’t keep a hard man down, nor a down man hard. Whatever we said we always meant to say something else about the world; we waited for our opportunity but it never came; this printscreen just kept spooling out instead: it prints and prints on screens and screens, each screen a tongue, anesthetized. It’s easy to believe that it’s the nude that means; then the heat shines through your skin the best; I watch over you like a drone, map what I can make out of love, upload it to the cloud. You’ll note it doesn’t get real close. It can’t. An ASCII-rendered slice of breast is not a breast. In fact a breast is not a breast, not anymore. It’s all just bytes and tits. Anything can be rendered in bits. The quicker that the culture gets the less well it remembers. I don’t mean to say it’s wrong.

Vincent Chabany-Douarre