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Photographic Backgrounds

By: Cal Y. Pygia



The keys to art, visual, literary, or otherwise, are contrast and metaphor. Contrast is the vehicle for establishing foreground and background, and it may also be the vehicle by which the metaphorical significance or value of the work is conveyed. Metaphor is the vehicle by which the literal and the material become media for suggesting the figurative and the spiritual. In this context, "spiritual" may refer to attitude, belief, emotion, imagination, thought, or value, or, indeed, to consciousness itself, or even the soul, if one likes, and it need not exclude biological, physical, chemical, theological, philosophical, social, historical, and even economic aspects of one's culture (or, for that matter, any culture). The spiritual is, in short, Soren Kierkegaard's "concluding unscientific postscript" and its contents and constituents.

Except for a brief example, we shall save the metaphorical, the literal, and the spiritual for another day, concentrating our attention, here and now, upon the literal and the material and, of course, upon the contrasts that make them visible and present to us in art.

The primary purpose of a background is to display the foreground object that overlays or overlaps it. In addition, a background may heighten the appearance of the foreground object through contrast. A background, as we have mentioned, may also help to express a metaphor that relates the literal and the material to the figurative and the spiritual. These latter two uses of the background may be designated its secondary and tertiary purposes, respectively, which, although always subordinate to the background's primary purpose, can enhance and extend the effect of this primary purpose. Obviously, it is the secondary purpose of the background with which this essay is concerned.

An object can be understood in many ways. The female breasts may be examined, as it were, from biological, chemical, physical, erotic, symbolic, theological, philosophical, historical, or other perspectives. Each is a lens that alters one's vision and, therefore, one's thoughts and feelings concerning the specimen, or topic. We shall take an artistic perspective, examining the breast or breasts in light of and in relation to various backgrounds, considering mostly such qualities as clarity, color, density, depth, intensity, shape, size, and texture in relation to contrast and juxtaposition. Variety will reduce, if not eliminate, ennui, we hope.

Although it is an error to take for granted the high art and consummate skill that nature or God or both have invested in a truly beautiful woman, we do so here not in ignorance but for the sake of convenience and practicality, for a beautiful woman, in nude or glamour photography, is and must be such a "given." Without her, no art involving nude women would be possible. Therefore, she is, not in spite, but because, of the supreme artistry that her face and form reflect, like the film and the camera, an indispensable "given" and, for this reason only, may, in considering nudes and, more specifically, backgrounds, must be taken for granted. Therefore, beautiful nude young women will be discussed only briefly and in passing, whenever doing so facilitates or enriches our explorations of the purposes of, and the techniques used in regard to, backgrounds for photographs of these splendid subjects.

First of all, just as virtually anything can be a text, virtually anything can also be a background. Some of the more popular backgrounds in the photography of beautiful nude young women include beaches and seascapes, water, foliage, skies (yes, we use the plural, for there are many skies, not just one, sky), rocks and mountains, landscapes, woods, pastures and meadows, simulated weather effects. steps, doorways, rooms, walls, piers, fabrics, buildings, and mirrors. These are the places in which beautiful nude young women are to be found, such photographs suggest, not in sleazy bars and parked cars. Female nudity is, above all, natural, but it is also decorative and inviting, if, sometimes, narcissistic. The fact that one seldom encounters beautiful nude young women in nature or in rooms within abodes out of House Beautiful indicates that these images are fantasies, not realities, that they are, ultimately, wishes fulfilled on film that otherwise are apt to go unfulfilled.

Backgrounds contrast with the features and qualities of their foreground figures, or, in photographs of beautiful nude young women, their models. By analyzing the features and the qualities of the backgrounds, one can identify those of the sometime-elusive foreground figures. One is not seeking to analyze such features when he or she studies a beautiful young nude woman. One is feasting his or her eyes upon the model's naked, lovely charms. The background does not make the same demands upon the eye (and the gonads); therefore, by extrapolating from the background's attributes and characteristics, one can identify the opposites of these as constituting the features and the qualities of the model herself.

The two traits that stand out most in photographs of beautiful young nude women are the models' smooth, sleek flesh and the lighter intensity of her skin against the coarser, darker background, whether the background is tree bark, stone, brick, leaf, or some other relatively rough, dark backdrop or scenery. A third trait is the models' angularity, which contrasts with her own curved and global surfaces and contours and with the angles of the background that brings out her angles as well as her curves. Trees that grow at angles rising to the left or to the right are often used to reveal the similar angularities of the model, formed by her bending at the waist, the elbows, and the knees--and her contrasting globes and curves, each, both of the background's angles in contrast to the model and of the model's angles in contrast to her own globes and curves, accentuating and multiplying the effects of the others.

In one photograph, a beautiful naked young woman with a tan is of a similar color to the branches and trunks of the trees before which she stands. However, among the stand of trees that form the backdrop, there are two much lighter ones. Their lighter bark highlights the lighter flesh of the model's breasts and upper thigh, where sunlight lightens the tan flesh tones, drawing out the differences between these portions of her body and the rest of her physique, the latter of which blends more with the larger number of trees and branches of a color closer to her own skin tone, suggesting that she is one with the forest but, despite this oneness, she is varied, just as the wood before which she stands is varied. The effect of her being one with the forest is enhanced by the poses she adopts, standing or crouching atop logs with her arms and legs spread or bent at the elbows to resemble tree branches. Metaphorically, she is a dryad, or tree spirit.

Rooms in houses often make models stand out in two ways. One is the use of bright colors--greens, reds, and blues, for the most part--and the other is a use of a fairly heavily elaborately or intricately detailed, almost cluttered, backdrop: bottles, houseplants, flower bouquets, mosaics, paintings, shelves full of various knickknacks and bric-a-brac. The effect is to emphasize milady's solidity. The beautiful nude young woman, after all, is a solid expanse of flesh, unbroken but for such features as eyes, nose, mouth, ears, nipples, navel, pubes, labial cleft (when visible), and the like, and by shadows. Against a highly textured background, she stands out, solid and sleek. (The shadows themselves, of course, can also contrast lighter with darker areas of her body and her flesh.) In a similar fashion, the surf, choppy and green or blue and frothy, but watery, can contrast sharply with a model's sun-brightened, smooth, tanned flesh.

To highlight the breasts, photographers often film them at an unusual angle, looking down or up or from the side of the breast or breasts or showing them hanging free beneath the chest, looking more like women's versions of bovine udders than the firm, round mounds or sloping peaks they normally recall or resemble. The shapes of flutes and columns or cylinders as backdrops--curtains, for example--also contrast with the spherical forms and curving contours of breasts and hips, and, when the fabric is sheer or gossamer, the fabric of curtains makes the breasts, although sleek and soft, seem more tangible and touchable.

Let's close our discussion, for the nonce, at least, with a consideration as to how background, complementing foreground figure, can express a metaphor that directs itself beyond figure and ground to the figurative and spiritual planes of personal existence.

Before me is a beautiful photograph of a beautiful nude young woman stretched out upon a rough-planked footbridge, the sides of which are made of thick, black-painted bamboo that is bound by heavy coils of rope. Beyond the footbridge is a wall of gray rock, possibly granite, and great, green leaves. There are two bright red flowers, like crimson fireworks exploding, one in the background, and a larger one in the foreground, before the model, positioned at her knee. The larger flower is the second object to which the eye is drawn. The first is the model's bare buttocks, the shaved labia of which are visible below.

From the arches of these glorious, smooth mounds, the eye plunges down, along her smooth, well-turned thighs, to the red flower, off of which blossom, angling up, to the right, a stalk of the cut, black-painted bamboo rises, passing the rope-coiled intersection it forms with a crossing bamboo stalk rising to the left, and carries the admirer's gaze along the model's right ribcage, above her dangling right breast, and toward her right shoulder and her arms, reaching out before her, barely noticing her lovely face, although she offers a slight smile, before, reaching the right edge of the photograph, the eye darts back, down the same bamboo stalk, to visit the calf and crossed feet at the left edge of the picture, before losing itself in the blades of the thick, green leaves projecting in from the left border of the image.

The scene's lush vegetation, the granite rock, and the rustic footbridge conspire to convince the viewer-become-voyeur that he or she is in a lush rain forest, or jungle--or, perhaps, even Eden itself--and the model, seeming to slide forth, into a serpentine slither, is, both context and pose suggest, a snake. It is no accident that the sinuous and serpentine shape that women may assume has caused writers and artists to depict her as a lamia, or snake-goddess, on more than one occasion, as the photographer who created this magnificent work has likewise done.

In the process, the metaphor Woman = Snake encourages the viewer to attribute to the woman the attributes that tradition associates with snakes, seeing her (and all women, for, as an artist's subject, the model is given cosmic significance, becoming not merely a woman, but all women, or Woman Herself). Therefore, one is likely to attach to the model, as Woman, such qualities as those associated with deceit, protection, poison, curative agency, regeneration, vengeance, fertility, destruction, creativity, suffocation, intelligence, seduction, wisdom, and, yes (sorry, ladies and ladyboys) evil.