Click to Enlarge America Swings By Naomi Harris
Check out photos from this book, Transparent City, and Misty Dawn: Portrait of a Muse in the gallery below.
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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
America Swings By Naomi Harris
Taschen, 256 pages, $500
In his famed dissent in a 1964 ruling on obscenity, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” It’s not clear what Stewart would make of Naomi Harris's new photo book about the secret lives of American swingers. Harris considers it reportage. “I knew I had to start photographing this,” she says in the book, “because no one would believe me when I told stories of what I’d seen.”
A Toronto native who studied at the International Center of Photography, Harris first encountered—and joined—the nudist community at beaches in south Florida. “They were there for the love of being nude and not for anything sexual,” she recalls. Later she discovered that “a good proportion of these nudists were also swingers” and began photographing them at parties nationwide, earning trust by always getting permission and keeping her distance from the action, yet wearing nothing but sneakers and a tool belt to hold her photo gear.
Harris’s book is not about the world of commercial sex; these people would not be hired for their looks. “The media may not consider them sexy,” she says, “but they consider themselves sexy, and because of that confidence they’re having better sex than the rest of us.” Many of Harris’s subjects reside in those small towns that have been described by some political candidates as the “real America.” That only adds to the significance of her undertaking. —Jack Crager
LOOKING GLASS
Transparent City By Michael Wolf
Aperture, 112 pages, $60
t first look Michael Wolf’s new monograph seems like yet another high-density study of urban architecture. But Transparent City turns the usual squared-up, view-camera discipline on its head: You can actually see into many of the buildings because they are photo¬graphed in low light, with the lights on inside offices and apartments. Yet the scenes within those windows often seem choreographed, as if Wolf were directing Chicago’s interior life (one TV shows Jimmy Stewart with his telephoto lens in Rear Window), and the big views are interspersed with blown-up details of the windows. Some of the latter are as sharp as the overall views. Others are heavily pixellated—exit signs, a computer mouse, a man practicing putting. Try as you might, you can’t find any of these details in the full-spread images. Is Wolf fabricating them to trick us into scrutinizing every inch? Perhaps, but he’s also challenging the idea behind his prior work, that photography is most compel¬ling as a record of surfaces. —Russell Hart
BLOOM AND GROW
Misty Dawn: Portrait of a Muse By Jack Sturges
Aperture, 168 pages, $50
Anyone who thinks Jock Sturges’s photographs are pornographic just isn’t looking close enough, as strange as that may sound. The more you look, the clearer it is that his gorgeously rendered environmental portraits of mainly unclothed, mainly young, mainly female subjects are not meant to titillate but rather to address the issue of comfort in one’s own skin. (Whether someone, somewhere might be titillated is not a good reason to condemn or suppress the work.) That purpose impels Misty Dawn: Portrait of a Muse, a 25-year study of the title subject’s physical and psychological transition from small child to married adult. No classic beauty, Misty Dawn is often graceful yet sometimes awkward, and seems more at ease naked than dressed. What will you look at most when you browse through this book? Misty Dawn’s face, which reveals a trust that only time could engender. —R.H.
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