From my old friend Matt Adams a few days ago, a wonderful sexy-funny image of his creation, composed while he and his husband Justin were on holiday at a gay b&b in the Canary Islands — a thoroughly satisfying semi-tropical place for people who live in the Netherlands, as Matt and Justin do, to vacate in while their adopted country slips into northern European winter (and all without leaving the EU); and of course a major travel destination for gay men (the beaches, in particular, are fabulous).
The composition, which I’ll analyze in more detail in a later posting, uses an image of Matt being playfully flirty while projecting an intense, earthy cruise (like, you can almost smell his sweat) — designed, if you’re in Matt’s intended audience, to make you laugh out loud and arouse you sexually, all at once. (Hey, it worked for me.)
Meanwhile, as background and counterpoint, Matt used one of four photos on display in that b&b in the Canaries, the Ladies in Red: highly sexualized (and stylized) images of women, which I would characterize as pin-up head shots, dripping with the redness of hot femininity and sexual bodyparts.
Today’s posting is mostly about the Ladies in Red. Matt and I haven’t been able to find out anything about the source of the images; they’re picked up and used in various advertisements (without credit), and Google Images seems to offer only that they’re stock photos of pin-up women. But there are at least four of them, and they’re clearly part of a thematic set. So one function of this posting is to present them to my readers in the hope that somebody out there can find out where they come from and what they were originally designed for.
