OTAKU MAnKO: Sex and the Single Polaroid
Since 2004 I’ve done a small amount of dabbling in erotic digital photography. In about five years of doing it, I’ve shot about 40 models and many thousands of photos. I’ve even sold a few photographs. But I still have a soft spot for the days when taking nude photos required a hell of a lot more effort. Before the era of ubiquitous digital cameras, taking nude and/or erotic pictures of myself and/or a loved one was a source of anxiety and, to put it kindly, a big pain in the ass.
Shooting on film with a “point and shoot” or an instant camera, was more expensive than taking digital pictures nowadays — but the cameras were substantially cheaper. What made the process difficult for “everyday” people were privacy concerns. Take nude pictures of one’s self, a loved one or a paid model, and one had to process that film somehow. That’s when fear took hold: I had often been warned that employees at the local drug store would keep copies of any naked pictures that crossed their counter, and very well might distribute them — if only to their friends.
What’s more, film featuring nudes was reputed to often be destroyed in the labs by self-appointed censors who would scratch or otherwise destroy any nude or erotic photos, and might even call the cops if they didn’t approve of what you were doing in them. Paranoia! Fear! The Government Is Going To Come Get Me!!!
The fear seems silly to me in retrospect, but at the time it was profoundly real, and to make light of it is probably ill-advised even in this era. I had friends whose nude photos, processed at the local drug store, had been scratched up to obliterate all naughty bits.
The “instant camera,” popularly called the Polaroid, was a tasty workaround that enabled a heated photo session in what I often fondly think of as “the old days.” I acquired one through devious means in about 1990, so my first few erotic photo sessions were done with a Polaroid.
The way the first one went down was this: A kinky girlfriend and I decided we were going to make sexy photos; she got naked, I tied her up, draped a decorative scarf around her to accentuate the curves of her oh so fine body, and in about three minutes the $12 cartridge of 12 Polaroid exposures was a gooey mass of erotica on the bedroom floor. Fueled by exhibitionism and an almost Warholian sense of having created a trashy piece of art history, she and I had fantastic sex. I refrained from untying her first, but I wasn’t a very good bondage top, so she came undone, which really wasn’t a problem given that the mutual turn-on of transgression and/or art had been achieved with a dozen loud snaps of the camera.
That $12 translated to about a dollar a shot. Oh so worth it, but well outside my meager budget as a regular vice.
Producing “prints,” if you can call them that, proved equally expensive; $1 was a good price for color copies, about the only option I knew of. I went to the local Kinko’s, where I sheepishly asked the attendant at the color copier “These are nudes . . . is that all right?” The attendant was unfazed, but this was Santa Cruz, a left-wing college town. A photographer in another city might have had a different experience, and for that reason many of them wouldn’t have gotten that far.
The thing that I appreciate so much about the few cherished photos from that era is the sense of naughtiness, the idea that we were doing something outside the norm. Nowadays, it seems like everyone has a digital camera, and porn is everywhere. Having shot thousands of photos, many of which look pretty good, I find that the only ones that actually turn me on are the ones I shot in the “good ol’ days,” when the Polaroid was a tool of transgression and a nude bondage photograph an entry into a dark world of deviance.
Is that any less true nowadays? Probably not. With some regularity, people still get fired for appearing in porn, and most “everyday” people with undistributed nude photos of themselves probably wouldn’t want those pictures to reach their neighbors or coworkers. There’s even a subgenre of porn featuring “real life” ex-girlfriends, consumers of which, I suspect, especially like the idea that they are viewing something illicit. In some cases this footage is simply repackaged shots and video scenes with familiar porn faces. In other cases, it’s something that wasn’t meant to be shared, in which cases the guys (it always seems to be guys . . . go figure) sharing it are ungentlemanly, to put it kindly.
Regardless, what makes my own 1990 nude photos favorites of mine is the intention — we were being kinky, we were experimenting, we were having fun. I still find them unbelievably hot, to this very day. A few private snapshots, even 17 years on, can go a very long way.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 30 October 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Sunday, 4 November 2007 at 8:33 pm Kitty DeMure wrote:
Great post! I, too, remember the fear of taking nude/erotic photos with a normal film camera. I was under the now foolish belief that the film processors were forced to call the police when nude photos came through. That seems laughable now…and thank god! Technology is a beautiful thing and now taking nudes is no big deal! :)