Magazine "Tachydromos"
Who would you feel more comfortable posing nude for: a painter or a photographer? It's likely you would choose the former, because the relationship of photography with reality is much closer than that of painting. Your nude photograph relates to the reality of your body. Even if your face was not visible in the photo, you would feel uneasy seeing the imprint, the trace of your nude body. However, on a painting, your body no longer belongs to you. You were merely the inspiration.
Painters have been representing the human nude body for centuries to practice. Its proportions, texture, skin color, controlled postures, and curves help them learn their art's technique. For the photographer, all these elements are as significant as capturing any object on film. In a fraction of a second, a vase, a tree, a monument, a street scene, the face of an old woman, or a reclining nude odalisque are recorded in the same way. However, the viewer perceives in each case the sensation, the firm belief, that the photographer was present, that what they see is what the photographer experienced at that moment. This sensation is not dominant in painting. The viewer is not even interested in whether the painted subject actually existed or was a product of the artist's imagination. They do not ponder the painter's relationship with the depicted nude. The object is the painting itself, not the nude body. The canvas has materiality and presence. The painter's hand is more visible and real than the body he has created. In contrast, photography inherently lacks idealization. What we see truly existed, and the photograph is its imprint. The photographer cannot ignore that the viewer is dominated by the naked presence and believes in it, while forgetting the photographer's presence. The photographer, however, cannot easily detach from the physical presence of their model. They see life in front of them. Only in their studio do they see a photograph. Hence, the photographer's relationship with the specific gender they photograph (male or female) and its representative is much more significant for the outcome than in painting.
Manos Hadjidakis, in a roundtable discussion with photographers for the magazine "Tetarto," which he edited, asked us whether we photograph the nude "before or after." Beyond its humor, the question is significant. The photographer's stance, their approach to the nude, will differ in each case and possibly affect the outcome. The time duration required for painting a nude and creating it from scratch establishes and maintains a distance between the artist and the model. In photography, the camera is metaphorically and (to an extent) literally an extension of the photographer's eye. This, combined with the speed of photographic capture, transports the photographer into the action space. It makes him a part of the photographed world while remaining an observer.
Plato Rivellis