Tuesday, November 11, 2008


You lie awake in the middle of the night with a stressed-induced insomnia and you have a good idea. This happens to me frequently. Seconds after the idea creeps into my consciousness sleep overtakes me and the idea slips away. Sometimes I resist, I get up and write down the idea or if it has to do with a photograph I go to my files in the basement and pull the one remembered out of the cabinet. And so it happened tonight. Just in case the idea wasn't that original I looked it up in my blog search engine. Alas! I had written on the subject of yielding flesh here. With insomnia still with me I decided to stick with the idea even if it is a second time around.

Twenty four years later after I called up Joanne Dahl, left, (Why not, after all I am a photographer!) and asked her what was erotic I can still feel the shock of her unexpected answer, "Yielding flesh." Shortly after, I took some photographs of Lalita who would have made Alfred Eisenstaedt make a double take (Eisenstaedt discovered Sophia Loren) and tried to apply Dahl's idea on what was erotic. I came up with this shot and when I told her boss, Tony Ricci that I had photographed Lalita's feet and had taken pictures of her pressing on her arm with her fingers he looked at me in disbelief as if I had been trying to sell him the Brooklyn Bridge cheap.



Twenty four years later the shock of that unexpected answer from Dahl is still with me but much diminished. I don't think about the erotic all that much. Perhaps I don't need to ask. Could it be that I know the answer? Not likely. More likely the question does not have much relevance to my life and death is much more exciting.

For yet another take on yielding flesh read the latter part of this.