"If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh."

For my new project I have been researching female artists who use the female form in their work. After purchasing Phaidon's brilliant new book The Artist's Body, I became fascinated with the work of Jenny Saville, especially her collaboration with photographer Glen Luchford of which some images are shown below. This work really caught my eye as it captures the female nude in the way I am looking into, unromanticized and raw unlike how I believe a lot of male photographers always document it. Saville's body is not perfect in the way the media represents women and the photographs are deliciously fleshy.

Saville lays on top of a large sheet of perspex as Glen Luchford, a fashion photographer, photographs from below. The resulting images present a female nude distorted by pressing heavily on the perspex but is also beautiful due to the use of light and the opulent slickness of photography. Both seductive and disturbing, Saville's form is being pushed out of the 'canvas' towards the viewer rather than remaining safely at a distance, a theme I am working with within my self portraits for my final project, showing raw, unperfect flesh right up in the viewer's face. The huge scale of Saville's photographs, together with the cropping of her body, which almost completely fills the frame, contribute to the overwhelming sense of flesh and are a huge inspiration for my, more subtle, but fleshy self portraits.