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| The Black Crowes used this James Baes photograph for their "Amorica" album. |
James Baes is the absolute master of his genre. And if his name and talent are rarely acknowledged within the world of critics, curators, or historians, it is because he operates principally in a territory of image making that is largely shunned by the custodians of photohistory’s pantheon. Baes has enjoyed a long and successful career as a magazine and advertising photographer specializing in the highly styled, highly eroticized female nude. Working exclusively in color, he has developed a powerful signature style—often imitated, rarely matched.
Born in Paris, Baes became acquainted with the female form while spending time with his father, Emile, an artist whose subject was the nude. His discovery in his father’s library of the exuberant plein-air California nudes of photographer André de Dienes sowed the seed of his own aesthetic. From an early age, Baes traveled a great deal between France, Italy, Egypt, and the United States. While studying film and television production at the University of Southern California, he was seduced by the light and landscape, by the emerging potential of the media, and by the imagery of the American Dream. He made his commitment to photography as a profession and ultimately settled in the U.S.
Baes has made pictures for countless magazines and has acknowledged as crucial in his development the opportunities to photograph fashion and the nude provided in the 1970s in Europe by the art directors of the German magazine Stern and the French Lui. But his principal and most significant patron was to be the controversial U.S. publisher Larry Flynt. Living and working in the States from 1976, Baes pushed the limits for Flynt’s two groundbreaking “skin” magazines, Hustler and Chic, launched in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Given a free creative hand, he dramatically raised the stakes and invented a genre that fused the most unrestrained and provocative imagery with a dazzling level of visual sophistication.
There is something undeniably compelling, highly subversive, and challenging about the picture sequences presented by James Baes on the pages of Flynt’s publications through the late ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It is difficult to imagine anyone reacting with indifference to such forceful images—images that generate responses as extreme as the subject matter. Some feel shock at the graphic bluntness. Others are mesmerized by Baes’s ability to achieve a unique vividness—an effect of heightened reality that gives such impact to the bold and intense sensuality of what is depicted. He has a sharp and fearless eye in creating a completely convincing parallel universe of hyperreal eroticism. The resulting images have an exceptional immediacy. The Baes girl has an almost tangible presence that burns the retina.
Baes is a masterful picture-maker, an instinctive colorist; he’s at his best playing with saturated chromatic contrasts in strong daylight. He has a sculptor’s eye for the effects of light and seems able to bend the sun’s rays to his will as he animates his picture surfaces with multiple flickers of direct and reflected highlight. Baes is also a skilled stylist, perhaps a legacy of his fashion work, and uses settings to add a visual charge as well as subliminal messages. But the focal point is always the girl, and Baes approaches his subject with disarming directness.
Baes has applied his skills to many advertising commissions in addition to his extensive editorial work, ready to create memorable imagery for any client who could figure a reason to feature a naked or near-naked girl in the shoot. Clients have included sexy Italian fashion label Fiorucci, Straskin, manufacturers of diving gear, Hygrade Food Products, Clark Trucks, and Batterley Building Materials Ltd. For the latter Baes contrasted the texture of the company’s bricks with tanned skin, sparkling with suntan oil and water droplets. A 1994 cover for the album Amorica by rock band The Black Crowes reprised a picture first published as the politically confrontational bicentenary July 1976 cover of Hustler. Baes knows how to create challenging, high-impact images that have, with their strongly distilled blend of willful shock value and high polish, come to represent a historic liberalizing adventure in American publishing.
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