Gutenbild Photography

FUCK the new Tumblr rules. Fuck you Tumblr for eliminating a place for sex workers, models, photographers, etc to share and connect.

My name is Christian.

I am 47 years old and I am an artist from Northern Germany.

This is my manifesto:

I like to be nude at times, because being nude feels good to me.

I want to live in a world where it is as inacceptable to discriminate against nudity as it is to discriminate against color of skin, origin, gender or religion (only to name a few).

This world wouldn’t require the label “nudist” for anybody, because being nude would be as accepted as wearing clothes.

Being nude is not sexual.

If being nude is considered illegal, the law needs to be changed.

My name ist Christian. I am 47 years old and live in Northern Germany. Working in artistic nude photography I get in contact with a lot of people who love the human form and are not afraid of having their photo taken. If it comes to publishing these images though, a lot of them fear for being judged or even loosing their job.

Being nude makes so many people feel good, yet so few of them dare to be nude when they feel like it. Society makes us feel ashamed of our naked bodies. So we hide them away. When we forget our swimsuit on a hot day we’d rather stay fully clothed on the beach than skinny-dip the hell out of our overheated bodies.

I strongly believe that everybody should be able to do whatever they love (unless it harms others) without being ostracised.

I want to live in a world where it is as inacceptable to discriminate against nudity as it is to discriminate against color of skin, origin, gender or religion (only to name a few).

When Tumblr announced they’d ban all NSFW (not safe for work) content a few days ago, I realised that society is headed the wrong direction.

Nudity should not be considered NSWF nor should any other of our private affairs that we choose to discuss on social media or in the real world. This is about freedom of speech, this is about the right to express ourselves as human beings.

Consider Tumblr may have been forced to change their community guidelines by economic pressure and legislation. If this is true we can hardly blame them they complied. The problem is not Tumblr, the change of their guidelines is only a symptom.

But who is to blame if legislation and economic pressure dictate our ability to express ourselves?

I’m afraid the answer is: It’s us!

We’ve been silent for too long. We haven’t lived up to our responsibilities as being the sovereign of our governments. We have to make ourselves heard! Otherwise other people will decide what’s best for us.

I have created this blog to make myself heard.

This isn’t just porn being deleted. @Tumblr was about a platform for Queer and LGBT+ expression. Where the community connected amongst each other on issues beyond gender. Where folx felt free to ask questions and explore themselves.

Queer porn and issues have little to no platforms; so to connect on a website where there is such a vast array of bodies, genders, queer smut, erotica; is a political stance.

NUDITY IS ART. Sex is art. People’s personal expressions of their bodies in a political climate that tells you to hide your body, shames sexual expression, and forces a binary identity IS ART!

The countless pages I came across of folx creating a safe haven for their transitions, thoughts, and connecting with other folx with similar stories and bodies—it has been a safe home. I can’t imagine how many lives it has saved.

This was my home to a queer getaway in a politically regressive world full of censorship. This was where I gained extraordinary knowledge of Queer politics, inclusivity, and further strengthening my intersectional feminism. This isn’t just about porn.

I wrote about the Tumblr Porn Ban and what it means to me and my communities. 

“As our lives move increasingly online, spaces that are safe for sex are becoming smaller and smaller. If we push our depictions of sexuality into the shadows, we allow them to continue be defined and co-opted by the status quo. Sex is as important as any other facet of the messy, complicated, multifaceted galaxy of what makes us human. To isolate it out only makes it scarier, breeding misinformation, confusion and shame.”

All the articles about Tumblr’s incipient, self-inflicted death, pro and con, focus on Porn with a capital P.  Left out of the public discussion is non-pornographic art involving nudity or sexuality… which, as a trip to any museum on Earth will quickly prove, is a substantial portion of Art as it has always existed. With the demise of Tumblr there is no real place to discuss and share *that* on the internet anymore. 

Pause for a moment on that thought, please: the Internet is the most powerful communications tool & visual platform ever invented by humans (by some orders of magnitude)… but is seemingly incapable of providing a simple safe haven for society’s most precious asset, art.

No bookshop would think to block all books containing any sexuality from their shelves. No cinema would prohibit movies from showing “female-presenting nipples” across the board. Despite the oft-cited but purely theoretical difficulty in determining what is porn and what isn’t, in actual practice it turns out to be quite simple for a given movie theatre to show the one and not the other.