Category Archives: Gratuitous Nudity

“Who isn’t an ordinary person? How horribly presumptuous to want to be anything else. But I have to tell you. I’ve been treated as something special for so long and I’ve tried my hardest to be something special but I’m not, I’m not exceptional, I’m smart enough, but I’m not brilliant and I’m not spiritual or even all that focused. I think I can stand that, but I’m not sure if the people around me can.” ~ Michael Cunningham

Continuing our tenth-anniversary celebration of www.ALANILAGAN.com, we are putting the StoneLight project into the spotlight. It was shot in 2007, in the hushed stillness and quiet of various cemeteries. Out of respect, whenever I drove past the gates into a cemetery, I’d shut off the radio or the CD that was playing, and allow the silence to be an offering of honor to the dead. Silly, perhaps, but something I felt was necessary. When compiling the photos and putting the project together, however, I turned the music back on. Whenever I complete a Project, or am in the process of creating one, I usually think of an inspiration song or two that sets the mood for the piece. Music, perhaps more than anything else, can always set a scene.  For the StoneLight work, I listened to Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto.

It has a slow, contemplative cadence that is a perfect reflection of time marching on, and viewing StoneLight while listening to this music can become an almost-spiritual affair, which is precisely the feel of that Project. The slowly-shifting shadows moving over stone, the textures of carved rock mottled by lichens, and the varying gradations of gray perfectly complement the somber pace of the concerto. The architecture of the human form is revealed in sculpture, each rib counted on the depressed keys of a piano. There is a stately nobility to the proceedings (in spite of all the nudity) and only the proper piece of music can convey that.

You like to watch, don’t you?

One of the first sentences I ever spoke aloud as a child was,  “I like to watch.”

We all do, especially the more inquisitive and curious among us. We might feel there’s something safe in being the watcher instead of the watched, but there are dangers inherent in both, and a risk to all showing, telling, and receiving. When the watcher becomes the watched, that’s when things get tricky. In watching you may feel you have the upper hand, but that’s mere deception. When you’re watching, you’re rarely living. You’re not the one performing the action being looked at, you’re not the one participating. You are observer, removed and impotent from involvement.

Dare you turn your gaze inward? Dare you put yourself out there? It’s so easy to watch someone else do it, so easy to judge and condemn, lurking and hiding from all the other eyes in snarky darkness. What would happen if you drew your own curtain back? Would you be brave enough to face such a chilly world?