Nudity is political. We project our sexual fears, biases and belief systems onto public displays of nudity and pronounce them untoward. From Michelangelo's David and Carlo Saraceni's Saint Sebastian, to George Dureau and Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic male nudes--which pricked the sensibilities of the nation's art establishment over thirty years ago--we deem the willful artistic expression and celebration of sexuality while naked as sinful and obscene.
No stranger to sin and unbeholden to such dogma, I was particularly delighted to bite the apple and welcome photographer Will Roger Peterson's visually arresting erotic nude series Provocative Portraits to our pages. Peterson's Portraits challenge, titillate and engage the viewer through balletically collaborative still to live studies that employ photographic techniques that dramatically capture movement and gesture in his subjects, while conveying an emotional compendium of eroticism, euphoria, danger, freedom, whimsy and the grotesque. As Peterson's work illustrates, a thin line of culturally conditioned perception separates pornography from the art of eroticism. > Read More