8/8/2023 0 Comments Misty dawn portrait of a muse![]() In the course of my work, they had me lift full kegs of beer, weighing over 160 lbs. I was married for some time and I got a job as a bartender in an Indian casino. As you know, I modeled from when I was just a child. In a section called "Misty's Mourn" she writes ![]() It turns out she has her own website, where she does write about herself. But if this is a book about Misty Dawn, it is a strange one, because she does not contribute any writing to it, and he tells us very little about it. In the final picture, we see her nude at the kitchen table holding hands with her (then) husband Wade, who looks like a regular guy in nondescript shirt, pants, socks and shoes. That fact that she came from a nudist or naturist family in Northern California suggests that she is a little counter-cultural, and in some pictures she looks a bit hippie-like. In his introduction, Sturges writes that she was overshadowed by her siblings, and she enjoyed the attention of being photographed and she took to it naturally. We see that she liked dressing up when she was younger. It puts the reader into a more personal relationship with her. When every photograph in the book features Misty Dawn, the subject of the book is her. When looking through Sturges' books with a wide variety of people shown, it is more clearly about beauty, the human body, youth, and nature. The fact that Misty Dawn continued to pose for Sturges over the years is confirmation that she felt comfortable with the process, and the publication of the photographs of her. His first pictures of her appeared in 19, when she was in her early teens. Nor is it to do with exploitation: there's no reason to think that Sturges was taking advantage of Misty Dawn or any of his subjects. The issue isn't much to do with sex, although obviously Misty Dawn can be viewed sexually. Nevertheless, there's a voyeuristic and even obsessive aspect to a whole book of mostly nude photographs of person. It's a reliably arresting stance, no matter what age she is in the photographs. She was naked but a little surly, ready to strike a pose, aware of how she appeared to the camera, and quite proud. But looking back, we see that she never smiled, and she nearly always looked at the camera with her eyes narrowed, and that was part of her mystery and attraction. In the final photographs, the greatest change is in her face, which is not just a little rounder, but also shows signs of life's worries she looks at the camera with a little distance and even a hint of suspicion. As she gets older, she shows the changes of puberty and adolescence, and by the time she is in her late teens, she is a beautiful woman. Occasionally she seems a little awkward in a picture, but then in a page or two, from the same year, there will be one of her looking graceful and lovely. She's a skinny blonde girl with intense eyes and good posture when she is little. Part of the interest of this collection is simply to see how Misty Dawn changes as she gets older. ![]() She was on the cover of Radiant Identities, and if you do an Internet image search for Jock Sturges, an image of Misty Dawn will be one of the top results. They were taken in the same locations, naturist camps, as Sturges took his other best known pictures. ![]() The photographs are in black and white most of the nearly 80 pictures were taken in Northern California, and a few were shot in Montalivet, France. Many of these images will be familiar to those who have seen Sturges' other books, but many are previously unpublished. They are arranged in chronological order, from when she was four years old in 1983, to when she was in her late twenties, in 2007, with her husband and baby. This new book is a collection of photographs of one model, one of his best known, Misty Dawn. Jock Sturges' photographs of nudist girls are breathtakingly beautiful, and this beauty has overpowered potential reservations about the potential objectification and even exploitation of his subjects. ![]()
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