Get ready for the summer, boys (and interested girls)!
I dug this out of the archives from last summer, and had totally forgotten this shot, which I actually hadn't remembered to check whether I'd actually gotten or not.
Old girl in the front was totally in full display mode, while dude with the cigarette makes no bones about appreciating her – fully.
And if what I hear is right, this summer's fashion is gonna make Ms. Hot Pants look, well, normal.
And in terms of the photo critic side of things, I don't know of a better instant of "male gaze" being frozen for the eye to see. What I like even more in the picture is the way she is totally putting herself on display, so there's much more of a feel of give and take in the way I've been thinking about how femininity is constructed in Korea, on the street.
It stands out much better than in a similar picture in which I captured a man catching a glimpse of a woman (it's far more obvious when printed larger than the 500 pixels here), but she is totally oblivious.
I like the fact that in the newer picture, there is a clear sense of both a gazer and gazed in a discursive relationship, which frames the obvious fetish value of her high heels, which dominate the foreground of the picture. Visually, they form a nice triangle – a perfect one, in fact – so that makes me happy.
In a nutshell, I got damn lucky with that picture. It also happens to accidentally crop her face but leaves enough (via her mouth) to be able to discern an impression – in an ideal world, I might obviously prefer the face to be there, but as it relates to Korean law and the fact that this picture's a little hotter, topic-wise, than the average street shot, so much the better. No one's recognizable enough, thanks to slow shutter speed and blur do to camera shake, to really be recognizable. So – no legal issues here, either.
What do ya'll think?