Thanks to everyone who responded. With 17 responses in, I’m going to call the experiment over. Results are below, but first, here’s the story that led up to this.
Famous portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders was featured in an art gallery I visited over the weekend. The exhibit was in support of his new coffee table book entitled
XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. The book contains two portraits each of 30 adult film stars, one with the clothes on, and one in an identical pose with the clothes off. Each pair of photographs was huge and available for purchase at a price of $35,000 each.
Now, I like to look at naked people as much as the next guy, but I have to admit the idea didn’t seem terribly interesting to me at first. It struck me as a bit pedestrian, and kind of an “I’m out of good ideas” project. After one walk through the gallery, however, my opinion really changed. I’m no kind of art expert and never had much use for nude photography (except for use as “material”
), but looking at these pictures, I did find myself contemplating the human form in a way I hadn’t before. Comparing two pictures of the same person in the same pose, my companions and I agreed that you get past the nudity pretty quickly and end up focusing on things like facial expressions, posture and body language – looking at them in a way you normally don’t.
What was most interesting to me is that you would expect porn-stars to be so comfortable naked in front of a camera that you wouldn’t pick up signs of nervousness or discomfort in the nude photo compared to the clothed photo. But I thought that when you looked at the body language and facial expressions of the models, they actually appeared noticeably less comfortable in the nude photos than in the clothed photos. This was especially true of the photos of Jenna Jameson, which as luck would have it is the only one I could find both the clothed and nude versions of online:
Here’s where some disagreement comes in. I think her arm placement in the nude photo expresses a sense of uneasiness that is not present in the clothed photo. The clothed photo looks more natural and at ease, where in the nude photo she’s practically hugging herself in a way like she somehow feels more vulnerable and exposed (duh) and is trying to comfort herself. My friends disagreed and felt that she was probably told to pose this way so that her breasts would not be affected by the placement of her arms as you can see they are in the clothed photo. Although they saw my point, they didn’t get a sense of discomfort in the nude photo compared to the clothed photo.
So then I argued that her face also gave the sense that she was more comfortable in the clothed photo than the nude photo. It was something I couldn’t articulate well, but it related to her chin being lower or her head being slightly turned…something about it. No one agreed with me (neither my friends nor the people who responded to this thread). This led to a lengthy discussion about whether, looking at her face only, she looked more or less “comfortable” in one picture or the other, and could someone looking at her face only pick up on that and correctly identify in which picture she was nude?
Thus, the experiment. For those of you who did not stop reading after seeing the picture, here are the results:
13 of the 17 responses (over 75%!) correctly guessed that the picture on the right was the nude photo. Four of these people gave reasons for their guess. Of these, three said they thought Jenna looked
more comfortable or confident in the picture on the right, and since she’s a porn-star it made sense she would feel “in her element” without clothes. Basically the opposite of what I had been arguing. The fourth person claimed to know for sure the picture on the right was the nude one because of her hair. I didn’t really get that, but he was obviously correct. Of the four people who guessed incorrectly, none gave reasons for their answers.
So I don’t know that this proves anything one way or the other (other than you guys know a lot about porn), but I do find it interesting that the results seem to indicate a level of correctness better than pure guessing. I don’t know if 75% is statistically significant or if 17 is a valid sample size, but from a scientific perspective, there are obviously bigger flaws with this methodology. But as an informal survey, it was fun (I really wish I could get more of the photos to do a few more rounds). Thanks to everyone who took the time.
Happy Turkey Day,
