Nurse Meryl had turned and fallen in love with another woman. Her world had been turned upside down by the pudenda of another woman. Being a school nurse she had a very impressive bag of tricks. As well as packs of condoms she also had a variety of different coloured dildos for the students to use when they practiced putting on the condoms. The students loved them and it was rare for the classes to be unresponsive. With her bag of tricks Meryl was the life of any party. At the pub she was just as likely to display her wares on the table in full view of the bar staff (and other patrons) whilst laughing raucously over a joke that most likely she had told. With nurse Meryl there was no holding back. She held life by the scruff of the neck and she wasn't letting go.
Nurse Meryl would have loved the Japanese photographer Araki Nobuyoshi who has devoted a lifetime to photographing genitalia both male but, especially, female. As well as genitalia he has also photographed plastic dinosaurs, stains on the bitumen, stains on the bed, flowers, old buildings in the back-streets of Tokyo, women eating bananas or sometimes women sucking penises, There women are sometimes by themselves, in pairs or sometimes with men. Many of his photographs are of his wife whom he photographed right up until she was in her coffin after her tragic death from cancer. Because of the explicit nature of the photographs the women are never, however, on their own. Their relationship with the camera is an intimate and shared one. They dare the viewer to see what they want them to see. This relationship between subject and object is essentially theatrical, and, to quote the novelist Patrick White, "theatrical gestures only convince when you can share them with an audience."
Being Japanese, Araki often chooses to photograph his subjects dressed up in kimonos and tied up with ropes in various poses with their their genitalia exposed. In one photograph a woman has her legs spread wide and held in place with thick heavy ropes whilst being suspended from the ceiling. Because she is facing the camera, her kimono is wide open and falls behind her to the floor. In this way the genitalia is accentuated because her legs are not beneath her but stretched out wide. This is a very carefully constructed image. And the face of this woman, like all the others, is looking directly into the camera. This is an act of self-expression. Whilst Araki experiments with various combinations of ropes and kimonos and locations such as local parks with their children's playground equipment, it is the women who are in control. Desire is referred to rather than deferred to. Whimsical little man that he is, Araki's photographs allow the women to express themselves and to call the shots. These are powerful images of powerful women even though they are tied up. Nurse Meryl would surely approve (and have a laugh at the melted wax, the ropes and the bare feet!)
Words like accusations are dissociated from their objects,
They hang suspended like the bodies of the women so artfully trussed and undressed -
The eyes demanding you connect their owners with the body on display.
