I started with Andrew, because he was so nervous I thought he might change his mind! We practiced the shots in clothes first, and then removed them bit-by-bit. The difficulty here was that we had one house, and a lot of poets and photographers all trying to use the same places – so I had no choice but to get started straight away! Normally, in a shoot of this nature, I would always start by taking some pictures of the person fully clothed, to get them used to being photographed before stripping off. All of a sudden, what seemed a good idea at the time was now really making the poets anxious – and I’m not surprised really! I arrived at Greta Hall on a very damp, overcast, rainy day, to meet some very, very nervous people. My poets were Max Wallis and Andrew Macmillan, two well known, young, English poets.Īndrew and Max as they are normally seen (dressed!) We were to produce one shot for the calendar and one shot for an exhibition, and everything was extremely secretive – no shots were allowed in the public domain until after the exhibition, and the photographers didn’t even get to see each other’s photos. I have to admit I was very apprehensive about this shoot, as photographing nudes is something I only usually do when they are semi naked, as I’ve never met anyone who really wants to be photographed totally naked- they usually feel pretty self conscious and want to hide various bits! However I was under strict instructions that the poets were to be totally naked, but had to be tastefully shot – no full frontals! We also had to try and link the picture to the poems that the female poets were writing – one for each month of the calendar. She arranged for us to shoot the poets at Greta Hall, Keswick in the English Lake District once the home of a famous Lakes poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vik is a poet herself, and introduced me to a world of poets I never knew existed. She then created a 13-month calendar – the extra month being a spare month to do all the things creative people never have time to do! (Great idea!) Vik came up with a great idea – get together 13 male naked poets, 13 female poets to write the poems and 13 female photographers to shoot the pictures for a calendar. Vik & Adam’s 4-year-old son, Django, was diagnosed with Type One Diabetes and they racked their brains to think of a way to raise money for the charity. Last summer I was approached by Vik Bennet and Adam Clarke of Wild Women Press to be part of a project to raise money for Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. So look away if you are offended by pictures of naked men (not explicit) – and carry on if you want to brighten up your day I may have to put an “over 18” button on this site now! (i) Alan Krell, Manet, Thames & Hudson, pp.At last, I can tell you about the naked male poets shoot! I’ve been dying to tell you for ages, but I had to keep it under wraps for several months until the exhibition was over. Kelley Swain, author of The Naked Muse (Valley Press) Did Mme Manet respond? Why don't historians acknowledge whether or not there was a reply? Because, one is tempted to conclude, Victorine only matters in light of Manet, not for herself – turning her into a Venus after all. The appeal for funds is often cited in books of art history, but the next sentence always moves on to something else. Manet took a lot of interest in me and often said that if he sold his paintings he would reserve some reward for me… Certainly I had decided never to bother you and remind you of that promise, but misfortune has befallen me: I can no longer model, I have to take care of my old mother all alone… and on top of all this I had an accident and injured my right hand… it is this desperate situation, Madame, which prompts me to remind you of M. 'No doubt you know that I posed for a great many of his paintings, notably for Olympia, his masterpiece. She wrote to Manet's widow in 1888, six years after the painter died, when the model would have been 44: This latter painting, showing a hungry girl with dark shadows around her eyes, could be interpreted as tragically prescient – Meurent was often cited as having fallen into poverty and alcoholism, now a strongly contested point. In Street Singer (c.1862) Meurent poses as woman on the fringes of society, provocatively eating ripe cherries as she holds a guitar. Édouard Manet (1832–1883) The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)
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