Projects:
©Jaime Acker
FLASH
Essay by Soma Ghosh
Soma Ghosh is a critic, podcaster, showgirl producing and hosting The Demented Goddess, a multi-cultural, polysexual podcast about womxn on screen and behind the camera. She is often joined by top feminine artists & thinkers, deep-dives the latest and classic TV and films, combining English & non-English works. Clever, fun & badly behaved.
The boy is small for his age. Marching between these older children – being marched is what it’s beginning to feel like – he looks up the trees for a hidey place: maple, ash, oak. He could slip from their clutches and shimmy up that elm, maybe, like a lizard. The two girls stalk ahead, chins jerking, like maybe he’s done something wrong. In their garden, they’d called everything he said cute, hilarious. In the low sun, the hair of the bigger girl appears soil black. The smaller girl, a mousy blonde in blue sweatshirt and elasticated shorts, wears red flip-flops that go slap-slap under a Mickey Mouse turquoise Elastoplast on her ankle.
He’s a mile from home. Twigs snap. A shattered soda bottle crunches beneath his sneakers. There is no other path out of this wood except this puny trail. To return to their neighbourhood, he’d have to get past the silent fourteen year old boy behind him, almost six feet – a full-grown male, he seems to the boy.
The bigger girl pulls the smaller one against an oak, and whispers into her hair.
He feels the bigger girl’s eyes on him.
You said you’d never seen a naked girl before, she says, defiantly.
He wonders, did I?
Maybe, idling on a swing in their garden, he might have said something he shouldn’t say.
It’s rude not to look at the person who’s speaking to you, says the older boy, jabbing his spine with a finger.
In a flash, the brunette has her panties and jeans down. Once that is over, she tugs up her vest, with a little hoochy kooch wiggle. He keeps his eyes lowered, but once he’s glimpsed it, he can’t stop looking at the tuft of pubic hair, the white melt of inner thigh above her tanned legs.
The mousy girl is screams with laughter. He’s staring, she gasps.
You don’t get to look at my sister for free, says the boy-man, gripping his arm hard.
Yeah, says the brunette’s voice and by the sound of it, he knows her panties are still down. What are you going to take off? Or does Berg have to do it for you?
Damn, Berg, laughs the other girl, look at him! She staggers onto Berg. Together they fall, to the ground. The boy seizes his chance. He runs.
***
Aspects
of this experience, from his childhood in Illinois, resurface in Jaime Acker’s
Flash project, a series of encounters with strangers who strip for his Polaroid
SX70 camera. Bushy vulvas are caught in the scuzzy halo of Acker’s phosphorescent flash. Summer dresses are lifted, shorts unpeeled, jeans dropped. Though the
title and action of Flash propose 70s notions of seedy transgressions, the
pervading atmosphere, to my eye, is one of innocence. Playing in the woods,
lounging in motel bathrooms, his subjects appear liberated from the usual conventions
of erotic photography. Yet isn’t there a furtive quality in the askance glance
of the lens? And in the grubby colouring, and the snatched glimpses between dressing
and undressing? Innocent and sleazy at the same time, Flash suggests a slippage
of category.The project itself is a fiction, part of Acker’s ongoing preoccupation with how society, he tells me, “creates a logic of appearance. Society organises, for example, gender into a logical truth table. I take that logic apart and reassemble it in a different way, make a different system of understanding. I’m making my own world.”
His sneaky, private world has an instantaneity reminiscent of the photos Nan Goldin took of her friends, in the clubbing demi-monde of New York and Berlin in the late 70s and early 80s. “I was thinking,” he reflects, “of taking this little camera and hiding it in my clothes and sneaking around like I did when a kid.”
But Goldin’s cabs, nightclub dawns and narcotic bedsits are spaces where one anticipates euphoria and destruction. Acker’s hiking trails and suburban apartments are less obvious settings. And Acker’s models, unlike Goldin’s, are not personal friends, despite his party people portraits like ‘Portrait of a Seraphim’, or the 70s college dorm, mellow sepia tones of ‘Rachel Reading Old Book.’
The Flash project, in fact, was created with conceptual distance and material constraints. Each assignment was allotted one or two hours. The expense of the medium – 12 Polaroids for $25, using ten-packs of flash bars, was also prohibitive. What you see here happened in real time, turning woodland explorations into stunts, concealing nudity from the public.
The greatest artistic luxury available was collaboration. Most of Acker’s models were given weeks to imagine the encounter before it took place. In his opening statement to them, Acker proposed that they “play on the theme of "flash" where the bulb of the camera flashes, skirts fly up, drawers drop, and something taboo is revealed.”
Initially, Acker thought this taboo thing was “bush. I would like,” he wrote to his models, “to add my name to the list of those who like it. It signifies adulthood, independence, self reliance, and at the same time vulnerability and pleasure.”
As the assignations developed, these ideas of selfhood, vulnerability and pleasure came to the fore even of Acker’s most sexually provocative portraits. The photographer favours shooting upwards from a low stature, working himself, childlike, into a position of witnessing, rather than gazing, so that a bush-heavy portrait like ‘Kodi on the bed in Motel 6’, is less about a woman displaying herself to a heterosexual man than a self-discovery in a rented room of lilac chintz and brown veneers.
An early shoot with Sean and Susan produced the title picture. A headless man and a woman whose face is obscured by her hair, flash one another. “It was a deliberate shot,” says Acker, who used his foldable, leatherbound 1972 SX 70. “It was like, I have to get this shot.”
The image, snapped while Sean and Susan undressed in Suncreek, a woodland area close to Acker’s home, is playful, tinged with a deliberate amateurishness. The headless man confronts the camera with his dick, one hand roughly gaping open his jeans, as though conscious, suddenly, that the lens is watching. The woman, a booted leg lifting behind her, looks like a little girl following his lead. Sean and Susan try on the poses of provocateurs. Their clothing and skin reflect one another, in shades of putty and pink, wholesome, malleable.
Meeting the pair in the carpark of Suncreek, Acker had led them into the far woods, avoiding the popular stream. But months later, he discovered that their frolics had been perilously close to a hikers’ trail. It was early March, the undergrowth still scanty: passing runners would have seen the burst of Acker’s flashbulb. This post-hoc knowledge further charms the bucolic, penumbra enclosing the couple’s stolen moment.
Hanging on trees and on each other, Sean and Susan, in their series, appear like Adam and Eve, yet siblingesque, childlike, despite the “erotic charge” Acker says he felt between them. Sex is shunted into playtime. And Suncreek, a green space for family outings, is transformed by adult sensuality.
Polaroids, of course, assist a mood of assignation. “One of the things I told them,” says Acker, “Is act like you’re into me.” A risky request, were it not for Acker’s insistence on boundaries and on the comfort of his subjects.
The risk accrues a potent humanity, when pitted against murk. On Polaroid, these Southwestern spring evenings take on the greenish-black of mould. In Keira in the Woods #5, the nocturnal mood is alleviated by a single, chalky, bare sapling. Here, Keira’s warm white body, in blue vest and denim shorts, is a beacon, her half-amused, red-painted lips offering a relief from oblivion. The dislocation here is not of woodland becoming erotic, but a professional exchange appearing intimate.
“Keira is a great performer,” Acker tells me. “She transports you. As soon as we entered the woods, she got into it – she didn’t touch me or anything but it was like she was my girlfriend.
“There may have been a fantasy, to see if something might happen, to imagine things getting more romantic, out of control. But that never happened. People assume that I’m fooling around but about 99.9% the time, the boundaries remain solid. When Keira starts performing the way I imagine her performing, that’s better than physical touching. When my collaborators start imagining things the way I do, that’s wild. When I look at the pictures now, I miss that. I didn’t think that would happen, that feeling of longing for that moment.”
Acker’s framing encourages an aura of nostalgia. He frequently snaps on the off-beat, cutting up the moment,
Another subversion of traditional erotic photography in Flash is the fragmenting of the body. Like precious trash, we find hands, feet, a mouth biting the fleshy part of an underarm – a scattering of memory. The body becomes a new, weird discovery, as Acker tries to “create memories” with his subjects.
Dislocated in our expectations, we proceed with Acker as he finds himself embroiled in his assignations, wearing his models’ clothing (Self Portrait, cross-dressed on lawn, 2017). He presents his own erection, alongside a can (Self Portrait, naked, 2017) as something to be used, or discarded. While such acts, might, notionally, be transgressive, there’s a vulnerability to these self-portraits. In the blues and reds and palor of Self Portrait, Cross-Dressed on Lawn, 2017, Acker looks like a faded cabaret star, performing to himself after the audience has gone home. What could be more melancholy, than an unseen performance? Here, the fiction verges on pathos.
My favourite photographs, however, return the body to an earthly paradise. Lying naked, eyes closed on the grass, her flatly spreading breast not hoisted to the male gaze, Molly, in Molly Mark, 2016, hovers between being seen and not caring. The echoing lines of Acker’s composition establish a serenity. Enfolded by herself, the subject’s line of chin and nose is paralleled by her curving underarm, her dun-coloured nipple mirrored by her own lipstick imprint.
Acker has left a naked wash of turquoise on Molly’s portrait. Undressing his film, Acker undresses the conventional polish of traditional erotica, apparently unbothered about showy, public exhibition. The aubergines, plums and gold palette of the Charmaine series have a particularly private mood of self-love. In a backyard garden one evening, Charmaine’s limbs and the surrounding touches of vegetation share an arboreal quality. The body shares its textures and colours contentedly with the young spring buds or autumn mulch. Nothing more is needed.
Decades have passed since that small, frightened boy was taken by his young neighbours into the woods. Through staged assignations, Acker has reclaimed his freedom to explore intimacy, as a grown man and a photographer. As Acker says of his models, “They were aware of creating a memory. And I was too. Something good can come out of something subversive.”