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Continued exert from Short Black
...I keep them in a magic jam jar under my bed!
Actually no, I’ve never had the courage to be so flippant, but it does serve to illustrate how irritating I found this question.
I would think, what does it matter? Isn’t it enough to see the picture and enjoy it?
It was as if my photographic skills and the intrinsic beauty of the images accounted for nothing; my inquisitors might just as well have been looking through a Mail Order Bride catalogue.
But that is only half the truth. I must admit I enjoy a jealous pride in having had these women pose for me; how and where I met them is nobodies business but my own. You see, none of them are professional models; I pay them nothing. The reasons why they permit me to photograph them are both varied and intriguing. Some do it out of friendship, for others it is a way of supporting and participating in the arts – it is their contribution to the career of a ‘struggling artist’. Some do it out of curiosity, young enough to still be exploring their sexuality; others are of an age where they feel the twilight years of their youth are upon them and see my photography as a final record of their girlhood.
What ever their motivation I am thankful and grateful to them all, for quite literally with out them my photography would not exist.
My usual response is to say, ‘They’re just people I meet.’
I know this does not satisfy them, just as I know why they ask. My models are real women, accessible, attainable. They are the women who work in our shops and look after our children. They go to school with our sisters and marry our brothers; we see them in parks and nightclubs and sit behind them on trains every day.
Some of us will leap the gap and make contact; the rest will merely look at the pictures.
My nudes are very different to those you will see elsewhere. Nobody ever opens a Playboy and asks, ‘I wonder where they got that model from?’