Sexuality, profit, and aesthetics are the major ingredients of almost every photograph of a nude woman. Charles Traub disrupts that holy triad with his nude and seminude female figure studies. His models arrive via the ads he places in the “adult entertainment” section of a local paper, and, other fantasies aside, his pictures are about the way these average, mainly white women undress in front of a stranger with a camera. Directed only to disrobe and sometimes to stop in mid-motion, the women are variously forthright, awkward, and self-protective, struggling to act natural in a situation that is supremely artificial. Traub manages visually to dissect the myth of the sexually photogenic woman in pictures of naked ladies that are disconcerting, embarrassing, and absolutely riveting.
Vanity Fair, 1984
Vanity Fair, 1984
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