What Do You See?
The blinded eye
The other day I went to one of my favorite used book stores in Los Angeles: Alias Books East. They always have the cool shit. Pretty quickly, I spotted this copy of Radical Eye: The Photography of Miron Zownir. It’s an amazing volume of the arresting, alarming, provocative work of Zownir. The images feature hardcore sex, fetishists, erect penises, the unhoused, the seemingly dead, freaks, the mentally ill, exhibitionists, masochists, sex workers, psychos, criminals, mobsters, a hooded figure removing a string of anal beads from his anus, and other types. The photos were taken in Berlin and New York City and the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, in the last decades of the last century, and spare no one and nothing. There’s a warning on the back of the book: “You may consider these explicit photographs obscene, cruel, blasphemic, repulsive, and even pornographic.” I find them exciting, stimulating, the artistic version of jolie laide. Today, Zownir is (according to the internet) 70 and on Instagram. Of course, you won’t find (as far as I can tell) any of his sexually graphic images on the ‘gram; the platform doesn’t allow that. Our collective loss, really. And a missed opportunity. We are so very, very bored. We long so very, very much to see what we have not seen. We are so very, very tired of bland content. In Zownir’s work we don’t see the Other but our mirror images—stripped, splayed, spreadeagled.
(Apologies for censoring the cover of the book in the above image. I placed a pin I got at a porn movie screening in downtown L.A. Friday night—that’s another story for another time—over the penis of the man in the top hat to not get in trouble here.)
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