Media Event: "Intimate Strangers" Report
On Wednesday, Oct. 11, I attended a media event about a discussion of a photography series “Intimate Strangers” by Hugo Fernandez, a New York-based photographer. The event was held by the Emory’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, intending to explore anonymity, intimacy, sexuality and digital culture involved in the photos. Randy Gue, the curator of the event, said that by holding events about the most fast-growing art form— photography— the Archive intended to reshape people’s recognition of it as something remote by sending a message of how Archive actively intersects the contemporary art and trends.
Having worked on this project for about ten years, Hugo first initiated his “Intimate Strangers” in 2006, inspired by his partner who at the time was tired of being his model. Hugo started to reach out to other men through social network websites (e.g. Craigslist, and Gay411). Later he shifted to location-based apps (e.g. Grindr and Scruff) along with the evolution of digital culture.
The rules Hugo abided by in this series were to explore the complicated status of people he shot, how people react in the such an intimate and uncomfortable situation of being nude in front of a stranger. In order to capture every nuance change of sentiments of his models and maintain the naturalness of the photos, he tried to have the minimum or none control over how people pose and express their feelings.
As he photographed more people, he began to travel around and extended the diversity and ethnicity of his subjects. During his travel to different countries, he found that participants’ attitudes toward being nude in front of a camera differed greatly based on where they come from. For instance, in places like Paris and Montreal, sex is not a taboo and people are celebrating it. In the U.S., sex is still an open and free topic, but some worried their bodies and sexual orientations being exposed would affect their future career paths. Questions like what if I want to be the president were asked. In some countries like in the Middle East, people were shamed of exposing their bodies in front of camera. They were in a greater danger if their homosexuality were revealed. Not many people reach out to him to see the outcomes, because the photos seem like a documentary of their shameful acts.
Looking at Hugo’s works and knowing how he used digital media to complete his photography project, I thought of a men I met in Tinder, who is also an independent photographer and woking on a project pretty similar to Hugo’s. Yet his subjects are women, and his photos are more provocative and sexual-oriented. Genital organs are included. I absolutely considered his work as pornography without hesitance. However, Hugo’s “Intimate Strangers” sits in a liminal zone between photography and pornography: it’s more than conventional photography for its containment of sexuality and nudity, whereas it’s less sensitive than pornography since it doesn’t expose genital organs and the tone he used is romantic and poetic, with a sort of solemnity in it. I believe that besides disparate and nuance sentiments revealed in photos, the obscurity of what catalog Intimate Strangers belongs to also makes it a work rife with complicated emotions and properties.
