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Vince Hemingson says older women are some of his favourite subjects to photograph naked

Sandra Thomas Mar 11, 2020 12:37 PM

Photographer Vince Hemingson's latest body of work is called, Nude in the Landscape. Photo Dan Toulgoet

Soar from the Nude in the Landscape series by Vince Hemingson. Photo courtesy Vince Hemingson

Shadow and Light, from the Nude in the Landscape series by Vince Hemingson. Photo courtesy Vince Hemingson

Sarah Wellington posed for Vince Hemingson's Nude in the Landscape series. Photo courtesy Vince Hemingson

The 'Tree of Life' by Vince Hemingson. Photo courtesy Vince Hemingson

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*Warning: The story below features several photographs of nude women.

Vancouver photographer Vince Hemingson says his latest body of work, the "Nude in the Landscape” series frames the human figure in the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest, “from its beaches and shorelines, to its rivers and streams, forests and mountainsides, encompassing every season, spring, summer, autumn and winter.”

Hemingson says the black and white photos of naked women “juxtapose the delicacy and fragility of the female form against the scale and rugged grandeur of the landscape, contrasting the textures and tones between those two elements, and examining the relationship between the viewer and the subject.”

Curious as to how — and why — Hemingson began photographing women in their natural state, the Courier had some questions for the artist about his craft.

When did you first know you wanted to become a photographer?

I learned how to process film and use a darkroom in high school in Qualicum Beach on Vancouver Island. (Thank you, Dr. Beard). It was a transformative experience to see images emerge in a tray of developer and added a powerful alchemical and magical element to the process of making art.

At the time I don’t think I ever considered it as a career. But I was always an avid amateur photographer. As a college student, I travelled to Poland with (Canadian writer and commentator) Stan Persky and did the principal photography for his book, At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union.

Working with National Geographic in the late nineties and early 2000s on a documentary series, I found photography a welcome diversion from the responsibilities of being a producer, writer and reluctant on-camera host.

After some early success with stock images, I thought that, in a perfect world, I’d much prefer to focus on photography.

When did you decide to start shooting nudes — and why?

I was a painter before I was a photographer, so to do a figure class with a nude model seemed the most natural thing in the world.

I started shooting nudes again specifically because I was photographing people with large tattoos and extensive body art. In most cases the best way to see and appreciate the tattoo was without the distraction of clothes.

Friends, acquaintances, casting calls, people I’ve never met before on the street. I now have the luxury of having people approach me because they’ve seen my work and would like to collaborate.

You use models of all shapes and sizes, was that always the plan?

Initially, almost all of the models I was working with were agency models and fine-art figure models used to posing nude. They were almost all in their mid-twenties and very fit. And I was hiring them because I was an unknown photographer.

But once I had a body of work I began calling, Nude in the Landscape, my propensity to overthink everything came to the fore. What’s nude, who is nude, what does the nude represent? What is the landscape?

As the years went by, I became fascinated by the passage of time and photographing the ebb and flow of the seasons. Women’s lives have seasons as well.

The cultural anthropologist in me liked the idea of the Paleolithic trinity of Maiden, Mother and Crone to illustrate the seasons in a woman’s life.

And I noticed quite quickly that while women might admire and love some of my earliest work, they were somewhat distanced from the nudes because I was portraying culturally accepted notions of idealized female bodies. Which wasn’t my intent, as I was hiring models who were willing to shoot nudes.

I then started asking friends to pose for me and started seeking out a much larger range of representations of ages, shapes and diversity of ethnicities.

This was difficult initially. I had to convince a lot of women that they would look wonderful as art.

The first few friends I photographed in their 40s and 50s gifted me with their trust and their photographs inspired a lot of women to pose. The work became much more powerful and meaningful and spoke to a much larger audience.

In the case of The Tattoo Project: body. art. image ., the emphasis and intent was always about showcasing the tattoos. And I asked everyone, male and female, what their comfort level was beforehand in regards to their partial or total nudity.

I also quickly learned how important communication was. But yes, it was totally awkward initially.

Later, when I was photographing the Nude in the Landscape series, I found that the more I communicated with the models the more comfortable it was for everyone involved.

Your admiration for older women shows up in your work. What is it about older women that makes them such great subjects?

I’m an increasingly older man myself. None of the women in my life have become any less beautiful to me as they have aged. In most cases, their confidence, life experience, wisdom, and self-acceptance makes them even more beautiful. It’s shocking to me that we see so few representations in art of women past a certain age.

There are almost no fine art nudes of post-menopausal women, and nudes of women in their sixties and seventies are beyond rare. That saddens me.

If art represents who we are as a culture, and allegedly our highest ideals and aspirations, what does it say about us that we — and by “we” I mean mostly white, privileged men of a certain vintage because they're still the gatekeepers of the art world — don’t represent, venerate and elevate art that portrays women who are no longer physically fertile, but who are the heart and soul of our lives and communities?

And of course the same goes for women of colour or women who don’t appear in fashion magazines. On a personal note, it’s great to spend time on a photo shoot with a woman who knows all my pop-culture references!

Your photo shoots are largely outdoors and even near or in water. How do you keep your models from freezing?

I shoot year round, including rain and snow. Everyone has a different tolerance when it comes to cold or being in water. For many shots, there’s a lot of behind the scenes smoke and mirrors going on.

Blankets and towels you can’t see in the frame. And just about anybody can lie naked in the snow if there’s a hot tub twenty feet away. The key is never to get so cold you can’t get warm in a few minutes.

On the occasional gallery wall and my website. Sadly, my work on social media platforms is relentlessly censored and deleted. I am shadow banned on Facebook and Instagram. I am constantly threatened with permanent deletion.

As a result, I self-censor. It’s deplorable. It’s about placing corporate profits above women’s rights and human rights. The so-called “Community Standards” violate Canadian law as it pertains to female nipples.

But it’s also about placating some of the worst regimes in the world with regards to women’s rights and human rights. It’s corporate sexism and misogyny at its worst. It’s about controlling women by policing and controlling their bodies.

One of your most famous photos is dubbed, The Tree of Life and includes more than a dozen women. How long did it take you to pose all of those women in such a way?

My background in film and television comes in handy when directing large groups. I start at one end and then give directions across the frame. It takes about a minute per person to construct a pose. After four hours of that my brain has used up all of its bandwidth.

Beginning this week, Hemingson has 10 over-sized photographs hanging at Cafe il Nido on Thurlow Street.

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I was naked this morning. A creepy way to start this article, perhaps (I was in the shower!), but think...

By
John Mahoney
|

Published Mar 27, 2012 11:24 PM

I was naked this morning. A creepy way to start this article, perhaps (I was in the shower!), but think about the statement as a plain fact. There’s a good chance that you too were naked this morning, along with millions of other humans. Life is experienced via our bodies and nothing else, which places the human form at the very top of the most primordial ideas and concepts in art.
Pulled from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection and opening today is “Naked Before the Camera”—a tight, brief primer of the history of the nude in photography that looks at art’s most ancient theme expressed in one of its youngest mediums.
If this sounds a little racy for the Met, you might right. But, as curator Malcolm Daniel points out, the museum is chock full of nakedness (just this week, a Tumblr blog surfaced promising to document every nipple in the place). Photography, though, in all of its detail and “accuracy,” frames human nudity much more directly than the idealized, classical forms in painting and sculpture. In its specificity, nudity in photography is a different beast. Yet, as “Naked Before the Camera” shows, the same art-historical tropes and historical developments found in more traditional mediums also apply to the nude in photography—it just got a late start.
Taking a roughly chronological approach, Daniel defines the 60-odd photos on view into five “motivations” for their nakedness. We begin in the prim times of the mid-19th century, when photographs used as figure studies for painting and drawing provided an imprimatur of practicality for nudity. Despite their utilitarian nature (Nothing to see here! Just a model for art students!), a feeling of humanity and eroticism still manages to find its way into these photos, as in Frank-François-Genès Chauvassaignes’s “Female Nude in Studio,” an uncharacteristically direct portrait for the time that feels much more contemporary as a result.
Worth noting in this time period are two interesting recent acquisitions that Daniel says served as a partial impetus for the show (see images #1 and #2 in the gallery above). Produced by an unknown French photographer around 1856, the large salted paper prints (much larger than the surrounding photos from the same time period) depict a male and female form, pleasantly obscured by what appears to be a silky veil. In fact, this effect is created by a printing mistake from dirty glass negatives, which the photographer elected to keep rather than fix. This is one of the earliest instances of technical defects being valued for what they add to a photo’s aesthetics—a very modern idea, as any Instagrammer today should recognize immediately.
As we move into the late-19th century, we see the motivation for nudes in photography turns toward science and ethnography. As France and England expanded their colonial holdings, photographic depictions of the exoticness of life abroad captivated artists and audiences back home. Here we also see nude photos valued for pure information, used for crime-scene forensics, medicine, and as scientific studies of human locomotion (most famously in Eadweard Muybridge’s frame-by-frame sequences).
In the 20th century, we see the photographic nude playing an important role in the modernist, avante-garde and surrealist work of artists like Man Ray, Brassaï, Franz Roh. Here the body is often abstracted, emphasizing the artists’ new ideas toward sexuality and psychology. The next section focuses on photographers documenting intimate relationships between artist and subject, when nude series of friends and spouses defined the work of Edward Weston, Harry Callahan and others. And the final “motivation” is one of politics, as naked bodies bore new ideas of gender, identity and sexuality from the revolutionary 1960s to the arrival of AIDS in the 1980s.
“Would my previous director let me get away with spelling out ‘naked’ in flashbulbs on a sign out front? Maybe not,” said Daniel. “Yes, we could have framed it as ‘Treasures of 19th Century Photography’…” Daniel said, as he trailed off with an exaggerated yawn. “But people will come and realize this is not a polemical show.”
“We do have a sense of humor here,” Daniel continued. “We can have fun with the signage, at least!”
“Naked Before the Camera” opens today and runs through September 9 .
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There’s only so much that can be done to a nude body if you want to take a nude photo, but Paris-based photographer Dani Olivier has figured it out. Often employing dancers as models, he uses projectors in a darkened studio to bathe women in coloured light and geometric shadows , transforming their bodies into surreal works of art.
“The female body is beautiful, and I am working to produce beautiful images,” Olivier told Huff Post. “A woman’s body is eternal. For ten thousand years, it has had the same curves, the same shape, the same rhythm and it is something to admire. I developed my technique with models about 8 years ago. I knew there was a lot of potential after I experimented with a few lights and designs.”
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Greta is a Photo Editor-in-Chief at Bored Panda with a BA in Communication.In 2016, she graduated from Digital Advertising courses where she had an opportunity to meet and learn from industry professionals. In the same year, she started working at Bored Panda as a photo editor.Greta is a coffeeholic and cannot survive a day without 5 cups of coffee... and her cute, big-eared dog.Her biggest open secret: she is a gamer with a giant gaming backlog.
These are AWESOME!!!! I LOVE the GRID one.
Wunderbar! Mesmerising art, genius!
These are AWESOME!!!! I LOVE the GRID one.
Wunderbar! Mesmerising art, genius!
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