BERNADINISM

New Book: Gratuitous Sex and Violence – My Favourites

Preview and buy on line here.

After being inspired by the famous freeze frame photographs by Harold Edgerton of a bullet passing through an apple and other impact photographs, I decided to experiment myself. I borrowed a sound activated switch from a friend and began taking portraits of with bursting balloons and shattering glass and bottles.

The camera shutter is opened up in the dark and when there is a loud enough sound the flash goes off. I shot these with a flash gun at low power because the duration of the flash is shorter than full power. The switch has two adjustments, one for sound sensitivity and another for time delay that you can adjust for maximum impact. A friend of mine was a masochist and it occurred to me to do some pictures with her. She and her partner had came around with a bag of flagellation implements.

More pictures here.

My latest book is entitled, Gratuitous Sex and Violence – My Favourites. I came close to being arrested when I was nearly caught standing over my model with an axe for the cover shot. Danger and a sense of unease have long been apart of my work. A woman is chased through a dark wood or is mugged on a Thames footpath or becomes the victim of a serial killer. We see sex and violence all about us in the media, sometimes together or separately. Pondering upon its ubiquity in the media and the hold it has in our imaginations, I decided to include it as part of my new project. I have made some of the pictures more filmic and suggestive of narrative.

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In my new film I explore the explore whether vaginas look like flowers. The female sexual organ has often been likened to flowers. For example the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe are often brought up in this connection. One day with nothing better to do, I thought are they actually that close in resemblance or is this mainly poetic license? I had never seen a vagina and a flower side by side to compare them.

I decided to make it a project and photographed many close-ups of flowers and the vaginas of many volunteers and made them into grids. Simple at first but transforming into complex Op-Art patterns later. Do vaginas really look like flowers? Compare and contrast.

The Great Urolagniac

After winning the Vogue/Sothebys Cecil Beaton Award for my shoe pictures, I was commissioned by the fetish magazine, Skin Two, to shoot high heels. This was one of them. I bought the dog lead from a joke stall at the Lambeth Country Fair and walked it home to the amusement of on-lookers. I shot this about half a mile from where I live. I had to find the right sort of post that provided the right background and where the “urine” would flow in the right direction.

Just outside Vauxhall tube station there was piece of cleared ground used as an NCP carpark. I would often pass through it on my way to the Thames embankment and a derelict cold storage depot. My eye was caught by the colour combination and I decided to do a picture in front of the office. I had a swimming costume but the model had brought this one along. Nothing spectacular going on in this one, just graphic placement.

Young Woman With a Glint in Her Eye Stares at Absolutely Nothing While a Plane full of Holiday-makers Passes Overhead.

I developed this slide at home in my kitchen sink and as soon as I saw the lens flare in front of her eye I knew it was an Alva Bernadine picture. At the time I was cropping or partially obscuring faces so this picture fitted in perfectly. When I took the picture I did not see the lens flare because I did not shut down the lens and this was a happy accident. That is what I like about shooting outdoors, these unplanned fortuitous accidents that make a picture. I saw the proximity of the ladder and the gasometer and set up the shot. As I was getting ready to take it, I saw the aeroplane approaching and waited. I still did not have a flashmeter by then and the original was about half a stop under exposed. The model later took up weight training and starred in the tv show, Gladiators, in the UK.

This was the first nude I ever took. I looked at it and thought there was something missing. I saw the shadow of the ladder on the wall and it eventually came to me that what it needed was the shadow of a man climbing it. Since it was impossible to get the model back I decided to incorporate the idea in my shoe picture, The Fetish IV.

Writing this post brought back the memory of what I originally wanted so I Photoshopped the image. I would have been able to do the same thing using double exposure at the time. It would have been far quicker.

New Book
Gratuitous Sex and Violence – My Favourites

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