| Singer's photographs of nudes continues his dialogue between nature and civilization. He always shoots his unclothed models out of doors, evoking another California dream: that of a healthier, more "natural" life of sunshine, freedom, and physical hedonism. Yet ironically these nudes seem not only posed (i.e., "unnatural"), but sophisticated and urbane, their beautiful bodies the result not of natural labor, but of nautilus machines and lap pools. Landscape becomes theatrical backdrop in these pictures, and this point is made explicitly when, in the most daring of them, Singer photographs a man draped against the oversize pillars and urns of the great, dreamlike, and very faux ruin that Bernard Maybeck created for the Panama Pacific Exhibition of 1915. |
