In her new photo book Centrefold, artist Carly Ries repurposes hardcore and softcore magazine shoots from the 70s and 80s to examine objectivity and subjectivity in nude portraiture
“From a young age, I was taking pictures of women and curious about how people depicted bodies and sexuality,” New York-based photographer Carly Ries tells Dazed. She admits to taking nude portraits from the age of 14 – her first model being her mother. “Over time, I started asking myself, what does it mean when I take a picture of someone naked?”
In a later nude portrait of her friend Ruby T (pictured below), Ries captures her reclining, twisting body as it glistens with a white sheen on her skin. “I’m so interested in nude imagery where the person’s psyche and psychology is apparent,” Ries explains. Ruby’s piercing eyes look directly at us, challenging our gaze. “She’s not just a body. She has a whole thought process happening.”
Ries’s portraits feel very different to the other nude images featured in her recent photo book Centerfold – a monograph that interweaves her own photographs and still lifes with pages from vintage X-rated magazines from the late 70s to the mid-80s. First leafing through the mags when she was given them by a friend, she noticed they all featured girl-on-girl action. “They were clearly made by men for men,” she says, reflecting on the clichéd, fabricated poses and flower motifs. But what intrigued Carly were the moments between the graphic displays of sexual interactions – the display of lesbian desire. “I tried to find the places that looked like an actual connection between the two people, not because I thought it was necessarily sexual, but because they were colleagues.”
Carly Ries, Centrefold (2023)Courtesy of the artist
As a working photographer, she easily imagined herself in the photoshoot, positioning the models in these extravagant sets and capturing the explicit photographs. “I zeroed in on the moments that I would have focused on that almost evade the male gaze,” she says. In one spread, she enlarges an erotic image into a cropped kiss, transforming it into a tender moment rather than a performance of conventional hetero-erotic female sexuality enacted for the pleasure of a male audience. In another cropped image, the woman’s presence is only suggested through two hands, a stomach, and two wine glasses on a coffee table. Ries explains, “The images that had some tension to them were the ones with the details that male desire wouldn’t have necessarily picked up on."
Carly Ries, Centrefold (2023)Courtesy of the artist
Ries adds her touch to all the images in Centerfold, either by reverting them to negatives, manipulating them, or fully cropping out certain details and leaving them blank. In a spread that could’ve been the centrefold of one of the original magazines, Ries cuts out a rectangle from the middle and leaves it blank, with only the lingering suggestion of an erotic interaction happening through the two women at opposite ends of the frame. “Whatever action was happening in this blank spot was just very basic, but it was on display because that’s what pornography is – it’s about showing and not telling.” As we’re left to only imagine the graphic display in the white space, we’re forced to look at the only thing Ries reveals of the women: the direction of their gaze.
Carly Ries, Centrefold (2023)Courtesy of the artist
“Their job was to be looked at,” Ries says, referring to the anonymous models. “It didn’t matter what they were looking at.” Centerfold focuses instead on the women’s gaze as the most prevalent detail, with a recurring motif of eyes as well as photographic manipulations such as the book’s cover artwork (above). The original photograph – a cover of a Playboy magazine from 1959 – features the darkened details of a woman’s face against a scarlet red background. In the original, Playboy bunny logos were superimposed on the image, covering her eyes and thereby eliminating the model’s perspective, reducing her to an object to be looked out without the ability to reciprocate the gaze of the viewer. “When you see these eyes that can’t see, you’re not imagining what she sees or what she thinks. You’re just looking at her,” Ries says. “That’s why I decided to give her the irises back.” This, in a sense, is the guiding principle of Centrefold – redistributing the power balance between the object and the subject by restoring a level of subjectivity to the anonymous individuals in these unambiguously objectifying images.
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