This is my Truth: erotic images should be easier to look at and think about than we’ve been lead to believe.

The view of pleasure is less obstructed when we release control. It reveals itself in surprising ways because eroticism isn’t a construct of youth, waning social mores or instilled archaic behaviours. It never has been.

Photographs of erotic moments offer homeopathic doses of love, exhilaration, mystery, sex. They’re also very much about the desire for arousal and so come in two varieties; the instant-impact type some believe they have to protect themselves against and the slow-burning, time-release kind the rest of us want to stare at without apology.

The ones we stare at attract meaning and emotion because no image is ever representative of itself; it’s all about what lies unseen within the viewer. For some, that can be difficult because it involves an admission of beauty that starts in the eye but never stops there. When hidden things remain in metaphor even though overtly hung on a wall, the images enable deep reaction. The response is something innate and so it evolves; I don’t believe it can be learned because it’s a perception based from everything in one’s life that fuels the mechanism. To feel, but not to feel. To unravel and undress and penetrate with mere thought.

If those reactions are refused, the image becomes difficult – a problem to deal with.

Eroticism speaks from a sense of denied subterranea; like buried embers, a claustrophobic feeling is warmed by thoughts of passion forbidden during ordinary time. Feelings of caged sensuality can fume from an image like that to palpably enhance an auto-erotic response. Especially when it’s consciously (or sub-consciously) denied.

It’s been said that if the nude is “unconscious” of the viewer, it makes the sensuality somehow less obtrusive. The truth is that if a nude wants to be seen or her body language invites the viewer to be seen, we’re against a window separating voyeurism from theatre.

The moment the nude has your eye, there’s a possibility of erotic engagement, the possibility of solicitation through beauty. Gender can become irrelevant. The eyes have already been where the hands long to go and we imagine the territory in nourished exquisite detail. The truth is whether we experience an event or imagine it, the same parts of the brain light up. We’re ardent voyeurs whetherwe admit it publicly, or not.

In the right frame of mind (like that of a devoted lover or of two people desirous of becoming so entwined), this kind of eroticism beckons sexually because it deals with creation. To paraphrase an old axiom, to love the world with the eyes, one uses them as hands; to love the world with frame and lit curve, a photographer uses them as soul. Mythologies abound with such lessons; we are all Pygmalion under the skin.

The body is more than just flesh and curve. It’s a cultural screen onto which we project a complicated tincture of ideas, fantasies, fears and desires; from idealizing notions of beauty and to moralizing notions of purity and sin. I believe there’s an underlying pleasureless-ness to images being intellectualized via pop social values; something deeply puritanical takes away from the erotic effect. Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “… intellectual passion drives out sensuality.” How true. And, how sad. Nudes judged that way aren’t capable of inspiring surrender and therefore, beauty.

It is my Faith that even those who believe erotic imagery shouldn’t be seen with such clarity, ironically still possess a willingness to be stirred by the voluptuous and the desire of seeing what they’ve always denied.

It’s human nature to caress and worship things with our eyes. You just have to admit what you secretly covet.