Does showing a man’s penis make an image pornographic?

When I was first getting into photography and still shooting on film, I had a young gay man come into my studio whom I wanted to shoot nude.   He was very excited by the prospect of seeing what we could create together.  His only stipulation was he did not want any pictures where he would be naked and show his face in the same image.  He was OK with doing face images and torso images or nudes from the neck down.  I agreed and said I would work within the parameters.   Hey, I had a live model who was willing to strip down and allow me to explore him naked with my light through imagery.   He had a classic form and moved and stood in such a way that I knew would be reminiscent of a Greek sculpture.  I worked very hard to create a lighting design that would make him look fantastic. We both had an amazing session and were both excited by what we had created.   I processed the film and printed the contact sheets.  The images on the contact sheets were raw still, but I could visualize the beauty that would come from one of it’s prints.   I called the kid up and arranged for a meet, excited to show him what we had created.   When he saw the contact sheets and he too was pleased.  I gave him a set of the sheets to take home, he had a boyfriend he wanted to show.   I headed back into the darkroom and began to work on one of the images and it totally began to come to life.   I printed it on a beautiful flat silver gelatin paper so that the tones and flesh had a smooth velvety finish and felt they were actually emerging from the darkness.  Everything fell exactly where I know they would.  The print was remarkable; I felt like I had created a masterpiece that could hang in someone’s bathroom or an open space or a gallery.  Very classic in it pose, form, and structure.  To me it was perfection for this type of image.  It captured the essence of the early pastoralist style of the photo-secessionist from the early 1900’s.   I had been studying the photographers and movement from this era and was particularly drawn to the images of Fred Holland Day’s work.   I succeeded on every level to create this style of image.  In structure, light fall off, and soft focus beauty on the flat paper.

I called the kid back and told him what a remarkable image I had created of him and I immediately knew something was wrong by the tones of his voice.  He did not want to see the image and did not want to work again because he had shown the image to his boyfriend who said it was pornographic and did not think he should lower himself to the standards of creating porn.  I was stunned and shocked.   It really got me questioning, what are the distinctions between art and pornography?  It has been an image that has haunted me most of my photographic career.   In my minds eye I had created a remarkable piece of art yet someone else sees it as pornographic?   Because there is a penis in the image does that constitute porn?  In a sense this kind of hurt me because I felt like I was heading in a positive direction and it made me fearful of asking anyone to pose naked again.  If people deem what I am doing was porn, I would get that kind of reputation it will kill any chances of finding models to work with in our small town.   It also put doubt in my approach and stirred a question in the back of my mind every time I worked toward nude images. I took me a long time to ask someone to pose nude again, and it’s still in the back of my head as I work toward these images. The kid never saw the final image and I put it away in a box to be lost with lots of other worthless images I created.

VIEW FULL IMAGE: TORSO 2001