Getting the feel of the place/Photo Noir (Warning - links to material that is NOT SAFE FOR WORK)

Hello everyone. I'm Neddal, and I'm going to be your host for the next couple of weeks. Many thanks to Mr. VanderMeer for the invitation. Bear with me while I get oriented and adjust to the blogger interface.

Right then, let's get going:

There's that hoary cliché about a picture being worth a thousand words. You could hang a novel on the work of the following photographers.

Chas Ray Krider's site, Motel Fetish, features pictures of fetish models in motel rooms. If that was as far as he went, he'd just be another "erotic" photographer. Krider's work is much more ambiguous that your average "erotic" photographer. Some of the photos are staged to look like they could be crime scenes, some of them give you the impression that something nasty has or is about to happen, some of them look like the work of a voyeur. There's a sense of unease pervading his work that rivals that of the best film noir and strangely, despite everything I've written above, one doesn't get the impression that the women in his pictures are victims. His work has been collected into a book by noted art publisher Taschen.

For those whose curiosity has been piqued, click here some excerpts from an interview with Mr. Krider by Eric Kroll.

A couple of articles on Krider's work can be found here and here.

In a similar vein, a young photographer named Melanie Pullen has put together an exhibition of photography called High Fashion Crime Scenes. With (obviously) staged photos of suicides, drownings, kidnappings, crime scenes, and autopsies, all the models are immaculately dressed in Prada, Louis Vitton, and the like, it doesn't make for easy viewing, but it is compelling. Especially since some of the pics. display a savage sense of black humour - one titled "Dorothy" depicts a two feet, clad in bright red shoes poking out of a weathered barrel in the middle of a lush green field.

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