On Russia

There is a Russian photographic style. There is the common contrast technique, beauty amid ruin, innocence and brutalism. In the Russian case, what else are they going to do? Their women are beautiful and their landscape harsh and ugly. Here are some examples of that:

Ah! Are you kidding me? My favorite. Could there be a more bleak tableau? Softened by three feminine figures. Stunning photograph.

Life goes on. Leningrad, 1947. Gotta do the laundry.

Oh! Party of Lenin. Leningrad, 1980

Sometimes the contrast is in the people themselves, rather than person-background. Moscow, 1947. Russian women can be cold-looking, man. Cold women, cold background. Dancing is supposed to be like "fun," are you guys having fun? "No, we're just surviving." Ah, carry on.

The women are often cold in contemporary Russian porn also.

Hey baby, you wanna...

      “Hey man, how’s tricks?” Jesus. Leningrad, 1978. 

                                          This and the next are recent, 2014 abouts.

A rocket shell children’s playground slide. Grim.

Contrasts: black-and-white background, color foreground, brutal war-gay, airy lightness. Chechnya, 1978.

Beauty and dystopia. Recent photo.

Leningrad, 1978. Not much different-looking from Leningrad 1947! 

They make greater use of background objects, either as props or symbols. Contemporary Russian erotic art, painting and photography, has a more direct lineage to Western art history than does contemporary Western erotic photography.

                                   Elvis-on-velvet talent but a classic motif. Bikulov Nurhatim. 'Nymph', circa 2012

'The Brunette Odalisque,' Boucher, 1743

                    'The Repose of Venus,' Domenichino, 17th century. There are dozens of near identical Western art historical paintings where the exhibitionist theme is as explicit as here, and as it is in the 2012 Nurhatim.

Here is another excellent example of the Classical influence on Russian erotica.

‘Aphrodite, Pan, and Eros’ Greece circa 100 B.C.

Incomprehensibly, this sculpture was interpreted by some as Aphrodite fighting off a rape by Pan. Did people not see the coquettish smile on Aphrodite’s face, the full smile on Eros’, the playful way Aphrodite holds her sandal?

This suggestive, mildly erotic Russian photo from ~2000 is precisely the same body language.

Dense backgrounds, charged with erotic symbolism, were common in Western painting from the Renaissance forward. Those meanings were not revealed contemporaneously and many have been lost. It is clear as day that there is erotic symbolism in historical Western paintings but what precisely the artist intended, and what his patron understood, is often the subject of, at best, informed speculation now. Often times the background objects serve as visual puns, or there is a clearly intentional duet going on between the background and primary objects.

                                                      'Ulysses and Penelope' Primaticcio.

Background handjob 'Ulysses and Penelope' Primaticcio

What's suggestive in that one?

1) She's barefoot. And you did not do that.

2) Her torch is a heart.

Her heart's on fire.

Not a dense background but a dramatic background. I believe Russian.

Russian. Dense background. Yeah, the Cross as a window pane but look at the next one. 

                                                                     It's indecipherable to me.                  

Russian. This is an extraordinary set. An apparent contrapuntal painting duet. I looked closely. The woman in the painting is not painting but opening a door lock. Appearances are everything in art though. It works, it's brilliant. And that's just one level. 

She does not approve.

And then a third voyeur enters the picture. SENSATIONAL photography.

Russian. I have no idea what these portraits are doing here.

None of the following are Russian. They are Western paintings the themes and tropes of which were appropriated by contemporary Russian photographers and pornographers.

This painting is an elaborate tableau. In the foreground, a Bedouin has “harvested the steppe” (which is an actual "Greater Russia" historical occurrence, more on that below) and brought to his tent a blonde captive. In the background, the cherub and the pup dog disapprove.Multiple meanings. Irony.

Internal mockery occurs occasionally in Russian porn photography.

Cruel.

Now, what is going on  here?

The fur thing that each woman holds is a humongous vulva.

As is this husband's sleeve.

There is yet more going on in this painting. Like the old man's wife is nude. Like the new young lover is in the scene already feeling up the wife's tits. Most importantly the young wife is handing a pair of eyeglasses to her old husband. "You can watch, dear". The old man makes a circle with his right hand fingers and points with his left forefinger. "When I married her her pussy small and tight. Now it hang like wizard sleeve."

Eye glasses, looking glasses, and mirrors were common tropes in classical Western painting.

And in porn, Russian and non.

Russian.

You see that Jewish guy’s painting in all of this pornographer’s work. I have no idea what that’s about, but it is deliberate. The women do not have to be photographed with the old Jew leering on.

Non-Russian.

Van Eyck pointing out that the Arnolfini couple got it backwards: marriage then pregnancy.

 This is Russian,  Nikolay Bakharev, circa 2014. I don't know for sure what is intended by the stag symbolism, Diana The Huntress and the Stag? "Stag" films? In the English-speaking world antlers are often code for cuckoldry, but it does not appear to be here. Whatever meaning Bakharev intended it, he deliberately posed the models in front of the mural.

And that symbolism, whatever it connotes, had legs. Gawd, did it have legs. A different, unknown, photographer uses it here--the same, or nearly the same, wall mural. Given the common mural and the other artifacts in the background--I believe the doilies are intended as vaginal symbols--I think this is Russian..

Here, the photographer immediately above has the model’s head posed like she has antlers.

This trick is a persistent theme of contemporary Russian erotica. As will be shown presently, there is always something on, or appearing to be on, the female head. I do not know what this is about. The next four photos are all by the same Russian photographer.

             That’s an angry bull moose mounted head.

 Yet, against the same background three different models are posed to wear that bull’s horns.

                     Pan as female. Do not know provenance.

Antlers, antlers everywhere. I don't think any Russian.

Now abstracting away from antlers but with same intent. All Russian:

Look at that! Spectacular.

Adding a frowning man’s face in a tree and a vulture. The man-tree looks sad as the old husband does in the wittol-themed painting.

That is excellent. The model's hair color matches that of the branches. Very creative.

I do not believe that this is Russian....No, I take that back, I do believe it's Russian. This is the same photographer who has models pose beneath the leering Jew painting.

'Red Star Over Blonde'? It could be Russian, I can't make an informed guess, but again, the point is it's deliberate on the photographer's part.

That's a painting or lithograph or something. It's lovely.

This is bizarre and I'm very sure that it is not Russian.

I am very sure that these are Russian.

Can you believe that?

She looks into it.

Dilating on pornographer's intent and effect on consumers, the question immediately arises, and for its immediate rise suggests an answer, "Is this serious?" The pornographer intentionally chose the sex act to occur before a portrait of Vladimir Putin. In the third photograph the male looks directly at the Putin portrait. Is it conceivable that either pornographer or his consumers would find the Putin portrait enhancing erotic appeal? No, that is not conceivable. So is it camp? Political satire? Whimsy? I don't know.

I have not seen Putin porn previously. However, there is something else going on in the Putin porn that is a recurring theme of some Russian porn, the uninvolvement of the performers. They don't look at each other.

It's like they're not there. There used to be a website, "Grim Russian Porn," or something very close. That was descriptively accurate of the genre. The models, male and female, were unattractive, some totally unsightly, and this was the distinctive characteristic: the male and female didn't look at each other during the sex act. They were stoic, cold, like the people dancing in the Moscow 1947 photograph; like the performers in the Putin porn. It completely failed as erotica because the viewer was distracted by the actors' disinterestedness. Even in the rare case of two highly attractive fucking, as the two in Putin porn are young and attractive, you were still looking in distractedly at their faces, or at fucking Putin's portrait! I have never seen anything like it. Okay, so you're fucking a repulsive person, you're still fucking! You want to do something else? How come your dick's hard then? Why's her pussy take you without discomfort? 

An Anglo couple demonstrating the proper way to fuck.

It's de riguer in modern porn for there be the "money shot," and ejaculate the male does in Russian fuckography, but he ejaculates with all the emotion of getting his shoes shined. It is uncanny. Is the money shot faked? It very well could be. His erection is not fake but could be chemically induced by vitamin V. Both of those are possible, but the universe of possibilities necessarily includes that Russian porn performers, maybe real Russian couples having sex, go through the motions. It is my sense, only that, that there is a deliberate withholding of emotion in sex between many Russians, that to have passionate, sweaty sex and an epileptic-like spasm on ejaculation is not acceptable. Rather, their thing is to be cold and business-like. 

But what about the consumer of this Russian pornography? Presumably the pornographer wants to make rubles off his work, the more rubles the better. Dollars would be nice. Maybe Russian porn consumers eat this stuff up. Writing as one Westerner, and I believe this sentiment is shared, rather than lighting my fire, I'm blogging about how strange and grim and unerotic this is. With all that in mind, look at these actors below.

Since this is a post on Russia of course it has to end in the most unimaginably barbaric way.

Being raped is not cheating on your sig-oth: All in favor. Aye.

Sure, that's rape, kidnapping and rape.

Every summer in the 18th and 19th centuries the Ottoman empire raided Ukraine and Russia in an operation they called "harvesting the steppe." They kidnapped the most beautiful children, boys and girls, and rode away with them into captivity to the imperial harem in Constantinople.Those not chosen for the harem were sold at auction to other Muslim Turks. White slave auctions were still occurring in Constantinople into the early 20th century. (It was the only time in known history where boys had a higher value than girls.) 

The girls most desired in these raids were ethnic Circassian. For decades into the 20th century Circassian beauty creams were popular in the West, including the United States. The Circassian beauty ideal was composed of: 1) porcelain white skin 2) dark hair 3) light eyes 4) symmetrical facial structure 5) elancee figures 6) long, elegant fingers, 7) "regular-formed" feet, i.e. high insteps and descending toe length 8) elegant carriage and 9) "high spiritedness".

They were, in my opinion, and that of their world, the most beautiful race of women ever to walk the earth. And the Russians raped, disemboweled, and exterminated them in the Circassian Genocide of 1763-1864.