Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
Photographer Roy Stuart is the prince of Parisian up-the-skirt erotica.
May 3, 2001 | Oh, the luscious girls whom Roy Stuart photographs in Paris! He shoots them sprawling on Metro stairways, long legs spread wide beneath tight skirts. Teenage nymphs sip seltzer through straws, dresses bunched around their hips. Chicks likely named Brigitte or Fifi gaze at the Eiffel Tower as a breeze off the Seine lifts the hems of their frocks.
Stuart reveals female citizens of Paris wearing spotless, tight white underpants that wedge inside their derrières. Ah, say it again -- "derrière." What a wonderfully poetic word for rump. And because Stuart's French girls are all human, you see them crouch in the alley and use one finger to hook open the crotch of their white panties and urinate. They pee on concrete, on bricks, on grass. If you were to go with Stuart to the train station, say Gare du Nord, he'd show you dozens of traveling girls -- maybe Italians or Germans -- crouching by the lockers changing their dirty panties.
Stuart's third book of photographs, aptly named "Roy Stuart Volume III," is full of these French-style "up-the-skirt" pictures, just as "Roy Stuart Volume I" and "Roy Stuart Volume II" were. Roy Stuart is to up-the-skirts what Ansel Adams was to California mountains and Diane Arbus was to freaks.
"Each up-the-skirt picture is made to look somewhat staged," the photographer insists over the phone from Paris. "I don't want them to look like they're an accident. They wouldn't look as good. I think it's more exciting knowing that they're staged than if you're 'stealing.' Those are less interesting. The girl is not participating; it's almost like she's dead. In my up-the-skirt you know the girl is collaborating in your fantasy. It's sexy because she's aware of it, and it's more sexy because she's pretending that she isn't."
His words make sense spoken on the phone from Paris. In print they make you want to go, "Huh?" Maybe he is just being too French, even though this half-American, half-English photographer was born on the Upper West Side of New York. He started his professional life as an actor, but his only role of interest was a bit part in "The Godfather Part II," playing an American soldier back from World War II.
He went to London to, as he puts it, "escape" New York. He started taking fashion photographs and erotic shots as well. Then he moved to the City of Light, and it freed his photographic libido. "The billboards here are sexier," he says. "There's more of an openness -- a reality -- about what life's about."
I ask if he's going to be buried in France. "Buried?" he repeats. Have your tomb next to Baudelaire's? Live your whole life in France? "Could be," he answers. "Could be my base. It's hard to tell what's going to happen. I like other parts of Europe as well. Italy I like a lot. Spain. Italy. Yes."
There's a certain generosity in Stuart's up-the-skirts. The wind blows mademoiselle's dress over her face, but she doesn't look foolish or embarrassed. She tinkles in the alley as unselfconsciously as a poodle. Although Stuart is not French, I note that he has absorbed the French vision of women.
"What do you mean?" he asks.
"The French appreciate women more than Americans do," I tell him.
"That's a big generality," Stuart says. He pauses, then says, "I think in Europe that could be the case. In America it's more consumerist, money-oriented -- success going on. Other things are going on. Americans are going further away from nature with computers, further from the body, escaping more and more from the body. Your original statement could be valid."
Stuart's new book, like his first two, also contains photos of women over age 40, even over 50. The breeze isn't blowing their dresses open because they wear nothing. No doubt these women look the way your aunt or grandmother would look if you saw them naked. They have plump wrestler thighs, sagging breasts, maybe a potbelly, maybe scars. These women do not seem particularly French, because age is an international phenomenon.
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