'Those who restrain their desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.'
William Blake
Regardless of our needs, there are stages which lead to satisfaction. With food, it begins with a craving, a thought or desire of what we long to consume. It then moves to anticipation, the actual planning, the cooking, the excitement and salivation that occurs when the meat is about to meet the mouth.
This is followed by climax, when that piece of turkey and gravy, that burger, that pasta sauce or taste of wine slides along your tongue, satisfying your hunger as it slides down your throat to your awaiting stomach. This of course is followed by the last stage, resolution. The resolution stage is the most tricky to predict. Sometimes, it can be joyous satisfaction, other times it can be guilt ridden. Often, it is just a feeling of fullness, but without really feeling fulfilled or nourished by whatever it was that was just shoved inside you.
Just like eating, sex has four similar stages. Like hunger, it begins with desire and a craving. If we're able to fulfill our carvings, we move to arousal, then hopefully orgasm, and when finished, resolution. On FH, I've chosen mostly to focus on the first two stages. One reason is practicality. Given the array of artists, actors and models I feature, a focus on the climax could limit those interested in being featured.
The main reason however, is my personal tastes. In photography, I generally enjoy and get the satisfaction, from the beginning, those early desires and cravings. Although many images certainly act as stimulation for the final stages of satisfaction, for me, the beauty if often in the build up. Sometimes however, my boundaries are pushed, usually by artists whose work I admire.
'The challenge when photographing sex is the very blurry and highly subjective line between creating a beautiful image and succumbing to someone else’s judgmental definition of pornography. When is it art? When is it not art? I think the only reasonable answer is a beautiful image regardless of subject matter that delivers an engaging and poetic composition, a delicate dance of light, shadows, contours, angles; an image that captures an emotional moment in an ongoing story; an image that inspires mystery, questions and any kind of emotional reaction.'
I have been featuring the work of photographer Richard Rothstein for eight years now, and although his images have always had an erotic edge, Richard has released some of the constraints, especially those put upon artists by so many social media sites. With his OnlyFans site, Richard is free to move beyond the stage of desire, to fully complete the cycle through arousal, orgasm and resolution. If like me, Richard's images of the tempting Alessio prompted a craving, move on to the next stage, when Alessio met Sergey on PAGE 2 HERE:
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