Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Chas Ray Krider's photos unlock the noir sexuality of the quintessential American motor inn.
Jan 4, 2002 | At the Bambi Motel in Columbus, Ohio, an alluring, nearly naked redhead lies sprawled on the floor of one of the lodging's dimly lit, slightly raffish rooms. She's on her back, dressed only in diaphanous white panties and black Mary Janes, and her eyes appear closed. She could be dead, sleeping or simply posing for an erotic photograph. The viewer alone determines if this is a crime scene torn from the pages of a Jim Thompson novella or something a tad less sinister.
There are other rooms, other assignations and situations. On a wine-colored couch, circa 1960, a topless brunet in mules and sheer dark knickers is involved in various spiderlike contortions. Who is she doing this for and why, one wonders? More puzzling are the chambers where a touch of the surreal is introduced: like the backside of a woman decked out in vintage garters and high heels, severed from its upper half by the folds of a dull gold curtain falling over a vermilion rug. Perhaps the head and arms of this inviting posterior are hidden by the hanging fabric. Or maybe the rest of her has vanished into some parallel Lynchean universe.
The Bambi is not the only repository of such neo-noir visual poetics. Nearby, there's the Brookside, Motel One, the Homestead and others. It's a realm of half-full ashtrays, shot glasses brimming with bourbon and dames in horn-rims and bullet bras.
This sexually charged alternate universe is the purview of Ohio photographer Chas Ray Krider, who refers to his adult fantasyland simply as "motel fetish." For the past five years, he's explored this lamplit twilight zone in spreads for erotic magazines like Taboo, Libido and Leg World as well as for book compilations such as "Love, Lust, Desire," "Femmes" and "The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotica."
Krider's creations, which he also produces for the amusement of himself and his collectors, sweat lounge-era exotica from every pore, transforming the otherwise mundane atmospherics of dusty motor inns into scenes echoing the work of Edward Hopper or Alfred Hitchcock. Imbued with warm, rich reds, greens and yellows and accented with décor from a bygone era, Krider's vignettes reflect an imagination molded by a town such as Columbus -- a town that, similar to other parts of Middle America, retains an odd "Peyton Place" feel to it.
Like Krider's enticing, blank-faced models, these Columbus motel rooms seem trapped in amber and only lightly touched, if at all, by more recent conveniences and fashions.
"I'm drawing on my precognizant view of life -- that kind of '60s square life," explains Krider, who declines to give his age. "In high school, I worked in a record store, and I was interested in the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. But we sold tons of this easy-listening stuff. It was crap, I thought. I'd hear it all day long. I'd be so bored, I'd be flipping through the album bins, looking at these easy-listening album covers that have the most fantastic photographs on them. Very sexy, very seductive imagery. Today I find all of that precognizant input much more interesting and worth exploring. So when I go to a motel, I have in my mind a place where you could have a sexual encounter that's neither pornographic nor that Sports Illustrated swimsuit mentality that we have today."
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