The New Erotic Photography

Open on a recurring page: a small portrait of the photographer, a paragraph of biography, then the portfolio begins. Every contributor in this survey gets the same frame, the same handful of pages, the same brief introduction written in Dian Hanson's amused, knowing register. The format is democratic to a fault. It hands a photographer with one memorable idea the same real estate as one with a fully formed body of work, and the eye has to do the sorting the editing should have done.

The anthology form carries a built-in trouble, and it shows here more than the title's promise of newness would suggest. "New" was a 2007 claim, made just as digital capture and the early web were changing who could make and circulate erotic images at all. Some of that moment's energy survives. A lot of it now reads as a snapshot of a transition, not a discovery.

Look past the unevenness and there is real craft to study. The strongest contributors treat the nude as a lighting problem and a trust problem at once. Skin under a large soft source, the fall of shadow along a shoulder blade, the difference between a body that has been posed and one that has been directed into a posture it seems to have chosen: these decisions separate the four or five portfolios worth returning to from the ones coasting on shock. The genre punishes laziness. A careless erotic photograph is not scandalous, only flat.

The spread of approaches is genuinely wide, which is the survey's most honest strength. Studio work lit like a cosmetics campaign sits next to grainy available-light frames that could pass for reportage, staged fantasy next to something closer to a diary. A reader building a personal vocabulary can shop across all of it. The missing house style, a liability when you want a single argument, turns into an asset when you want options.

The usable lesson in the good entries has little to do with the subject and everything to do with collaboration. Direction, consent, the choreography of a session where the model is exposed and the photographer is not: the better practitioners make that asymmetry visible and manage it with obvious care. The weak ones let the camera leer, and the pictures curdle into something no lighting setup can fix. The subject may be sex, but the transferable skill is running a room where someone trusts you enough to be seen.

Set beside the single-artist erotica elsewhere on this shelf, Araki's documentary nerve or Newton's staged control, the anthology's limits become plain. Range is not the same as depth. A survey can introduce twenty sensibilities and commit to none, and this one mostly declines to argue for any of them.

Which sends you back to that opening template, the portrait and the paragraph and the portfolio, repeated until the structure itself becomes the message. What sits between these covers is less a statement about erotic photography than a catalogue of people making it around 2007, some with a real eye, most with a camera and a willing subject. Take the four strong portfolios. Leave the rest.