When you visit the MSU Art and Art History Dept. website, you will see this (rather mild in comparison to others) photo of Danny Guthrie.
/ www.art.msu.edu
EAST LANSING -- Naked. That’s how one Michigan State University professor poses with students in photographs.
The State News, MSU’s campus newspaper, reports Associated Professor of Photography Danny Guthrie has been taking nude photographs of himself, students, colleagues, and friends since 2008. The University later ruled that Guthrie, while he was allowed to take theses photos, he was not allowed to display them on campus.
On the Michigan State University Art and Art History Department Website, Guthrie's biography states, "My interests in making these pictures are both political and personal. Certainly subject matter such as this is politically charged. In the last couple of decades many female artists have investigated the personal landscape of their sexuality, as a means to seize control of their own representation within a culture milieu whose imaging of women has a long track record of idealization and exploitation. Taking my cue from this work, through direct and indirect references to classical painting and photography, my intent is to acknowledge these various traditions and debates, twisting and blurring the codes of classical aesthetics, contemporary rhetorically motivated art, and even erotica. In particular, I want the viewer to know I am investigating a history and practice of representation where the roles of viewer and viewed, seducer and object of seduction, are examined and perturbed. In short, I hope to move beyond simplistic notions of viewer and victim, exploring the possibility of a complicated exchange of power that informs the way these pictures come about....The images do not mean I have this or that fantasy about a particular individual or situation, but they do explore emotions that I––and I assume most others––have felt."
At the end of this year, the State News says Guthrie is retiring, and that he has been sending emails to students in hopes to continue taking nude photographs even after he leaves the university.
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