See yesterday's post for the discussion of how to keep reviewing a book a day when you've run out of books already read; today continues that theme. (But I should be back to normal tomorrow, since I also am finishing up my next Realms of Fantasy column, and that ate up three books that I might have reviewed in this space.)Tropical Blend is a large-format art book, full of full-bleed, full-color photographs by Poinsard -- mostly of attractive, thin, young women not wearing very many clothes at all -- with a short introduction (in the usual fawning, adjective-filled art-book manner) by Laurent Loiseau, which appears on five successive pages in different languages.
If Helmut Newton, whose nudie pictures I wrote about yesterday, embodied the fetishization of heterosexual desire, then Poinsard comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, placing his female nudes in natural settings and focusing on the play of light and water, stripping these breasts and thighs of as much sexuality as possible. Poinsard's models are awfully model-looking -- young, thin, composed, conventionally gorgeous -- for this trick to entirely work. (Though their slim youth, and Poinsard's tasteful camera angles, do tend to make them androgynous in some shots -- Poinsard avoids full-frontal nudity as much as 1968 Playboy did.)
So these are gorgeous pictures of gorgeous people, tasteful enough to sit on the coffee tables of many homes and worth looking at more than once. They're not particularly sexy nudes, which may be a feature or a bug, depending on your tastes.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Iron & Wine - Sacred Vision
via FoxyTunes
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