Angus Malcolm Photography

Towards more ethical erotica…

This is probably the most explicit picture I’ve ever published on my blog, and here is why I’m publishing it…

When I was a kid, my parents got the Readers’ Digest on subscription. One of my favourite sections was the column Towards More Picturesque Speech in which Digest editors selected metaphors and turns of phrase that they thought transcended language’s everyday job of mere communication to offer us something more poetic, insightful and uplifting.

I was reminded of this column at the weekend when I saw that the well known British writer and philosopher, Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is embarking on a project to produce a higher class of porn.  He intends to create a website, provisionally called Better Porn, that will showcase the finer sides of sexuality.

“No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation,” he wrote in a press release from The School of Life, a school he helped create in London. “It could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.”

De Botton said that on his site “sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.”

I couldn’t agree with Alain’s objectives more.  Why should eroticism be ghettoized in a taste and value free zone and lumped together under the stigmatizing label of porn - a label that suggests something almost criminal?  Why must it only appeal to our basest instincts? 

I’ve been experimenting with this idea for a while, most notably with my Blue September campaign to raise awareness of testicular cancer.  In this, handsome rowers are shown naked, squirting and smearing each other with blue paint.  The erotic element is incontrovertible, but the film also does a job that empowers everyone involved, including the viewer.  As I said in an interview about the Blue September project in Oxford University’s Cherwell newspaper, I am interested in how we can harness the power of erotica (and its prominence in our culture) to serve a social agenda.

The picture I’m publishing today isn’t about raising awareness or pushing a social agenda, except that the subject is a mainstream actor who has agreed to create a performance on camera that crosses the almost inviolate boundary between “regular” performance and porn.  (There have been notable exceptions, of course - Nine Songs and Intimacy are two British films that show well known actors with erections - but the boundary is still rarely traversed.)  In presenting a professional actor in an image that I hope will be considered artistic rather than exploitative, I want to show that erotic imagery can live outside the ghetto.

The actor, who is well known in German theatre, was staying in London for a few weeks, and we decided to explore creating erotica that would be on the one hand entirely explicit and on the other hand would rise above the biology lesson of most erotic imagery. 

This image is one of my favourites from our work together.  The actor could not be offering a more intimate, erotic or vulnerable display of his body to the viewer, but I have sought to avoid the graphic literalness, the deathless commitment to detailed mapping, that would be found in most images featuring a pose like this.  

So, here’s to more ethical erotica!  Although I think it will be a long time before the most picturesque porn is being featured in the Readers’ Digest.

New Romantic

Ugh!  Whatever happened to Spring?  The weather in London is driving us all crazy, and sending many of us to our sick beds.  But after battles with colds, throat infections and then flu, I’m finally getting back in the saddle on my editing.  Here’s an image I edited just last night, of one of my favourite models, Alex Wilcox.

Alex and I are going to be doing a shoot in just over a week at one of my favourite locations in London.  This venue has the same romantic quality that I see in Alex, and I’m already looking forward to the results.  I won’t say any more for now, but watch this space…

Dancer in the Park

Inevitably, after yesterday’s post about a shirtless Matthew being ogled by men with camera phones in my local park, I was inundated with requests for an image.  

So here you go - as I’ve said before, it never hurts to ask!  

Of course, it also helped that I was able to make a reference to the Lars Von Trier film with Bjork, but what I really like about this image is that it was shot with so little fuss - no tripod, no reflectors, no make-up.  Just Matthew, my camera and me.  

As the Lumography movement has already proven, creating images that work isn’t always about who has the most toys.  Not that this stops me wanting a new EOS 5D Mk III, or indeed a Hasselblad, but I do try to bear it in mind as I feel my credit card crawling into my hand.

I only wish I could see how the camera phone versions of this image turned out…

The Graceful Labourer III

Another day, another dancer…  

Matthew Wesley is 6’2”, devastatingly handsome, and currently featuring in the London West End production of Chicago.  It’s definitely one of the classier productions in town, and I think Matthew brought more than a little of that class to our first shoot together.

It was a beautiful day when we met. I suggested we go out and about in my area for a few impromptu location shots, and Matthew soon proved he was a trooper.  I got him to take his shirt off in one of the garden squares near me and had him leaning against a tree, looking sultry.  He laughed at something behind me, and I turned round to see that several men seemed to have sprung out of nowhere, camera phones at the ready.  I suggested we move on.  ”No, let them get their shots,” he responded. “It’s cool.”  

Back at the studio, we did a few nude shots - Matthew’s first - and I asked him to turn and face away from me.  He pulled a face.  ”You don’t want to see my ass, I promise. It’s huge.”  But he turned around anyway, and offered a perfect demonstration of how much dancing can do for your butt.  

“Matt,” I said. “Are you kidding me? Your ass is just about perfect, and should be available for viewing by everyone!”  

So here it is.  Enjoy.

The Graceful Labourer II

Thomas was able to achieve extraordinary poses, and I think it was because his dancer’s background told him that everything begins with the feet.  I say this to models all the time  - if your feet are parallel and they’re both flat on the floor, the chances are that you’re not giving me a very interesting pose.  The best models know to put their feet at a strange angle, to go on tiptoe, and then to follow through with the knees and the legs.  Then, everything else kinda follows.  And you end up with what good looks like.

Of course, this means that you get more than a few shots where it looks like the model was having a fit, but these are the ones that never leave the edit.  And as somebody  once said to me “If it doesn’t feel stupid, it probably doesn’t look good.”

So basically, when it comes to modelling, as with so much else in life, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.  If the model can’t break free from whatever it is that stops us all from running up the high street naked belting out Abba songs, then they’re never going to be a great model.  (I can usually tell within a few minutes who’s got the cojones to come up with the goods.)

Thomas had no problem with creating amazing poses.  He had a lot of questions before the shoot about the degree of nudity involved but, once he understood that I only publish implied nudes online,  he focused on his job and never betrayed any sign of nervousness at how exposed he might be in some of the shots.  A graceful labourer, and a photographer’s dream.

The Graceful Labourer

I love dancers’ bodies.  So many of us strive for a great physique as an end in itself, but with dancers the beauty of their bodies is a happy side-effect of creating something bigger.  

I guess it’s like the workmen who go to my local greasy spoon every day for breakfast.  These are men who do hard physical labour all week, and you know that their bodies are a reflection of that, not of hours spent pumping themselves up at the gym.  Perhaps it’s because of this that they are among the most handsome and naturally athletic men I have ever seen. 

And so it is with dancers.  They work hard for hours every day to build something through shape and movement, pushing their bodies to extremes to get there.  They may not be shovelling cement but they are, in a sense, graceful labourers.

Thomas is an Australian dancer I met in London.  He specialises in contemporary dance and has also been in several music videos.  When I learned that he did contemporary dance, I was surprised that my shoot was the first time he had been asked to perform nude, but he was very relaxed and professional.  

What I love about this shot is how Thomas creates a real dynamism in the pose, and how the dancer’s body, while not carefully sculpted for aesthetic appeal like the gym-honed models, nevertheless astonishes through the grace it achieves.

By Special Request

Somebody who follows my blog contacted me on Facebook to say how much she’d enjoyed the last couple of posts about everyday men.  She mentioned that she particularly liked Chris, so this image is for her.

Two things about this.  First of all, if you have any ideas for what you’d like to see on the blog, do feel free to drop me a line!  It works (see above).

Secondly, I have been surprised by the number of women who read my blog or write to me about my work.  I guess I pretty much assumed that my work would appeal mainly to other men, though I definitely didn’t set out to create work specifically for a gay market.  I guess I was just brought up in a culture that insisted only men like to look.   The internet has proved that that is just not true, and I’m really delighted at the response my work gets from women.

My favourite response came from one of my aunts, who is 82.  I sent her a copy of my rowing calendar at Christmas (which of course features a lot of Chris) and got a voicemail saying “I’ve just received your calendar, Angus, and I’m not sure you should be sending things like that to ladies of my age.”  Oh dear, I thought. “But I’m terribly glad you did!” she went on, to my relief.  ”What lovely boys! It took me right back! To hell with the heart condition - it’s going over the bed.”

Hmmm. Golden Girls meets Cougar Town.  Maybe I should go back to my old job, and write a sitcom… 

Beauty is all around us II

Following hot on the heels of non-model Steve, here is Chris.  Chris is another guy who could walk into any major agency in any major city tomorrow and start an equally major modelling career.  And like Steve, he just shrugs and laughs at the idea.

Some of you may recognise Chris from elsewhere on my blog, and the irony is that though he isn’t a model, I’ve probably photographed him more times than any other subject.  He is in effect my all time favourite muse, and I feel very lucky that this particular everyday guy has posed for me so often.  

This shot is special to me because it’s from our very first shoot together.  I had a basic camera with a kit lens, no lights and not much of a clue.  But when I started to photograph Chris, I saw a kind of magic happen, and I have seen it on every shoot since where I’ve been able to work with great models.   They create something astonishing with a look, a gesture or a tilt of their head, and you raise your game to capture it.  

Chris and I had little more than our instincts on that first shoot we did, but for me this shot was early proof in my photographic journey that beauty is indeed all around us.