Bill Durgin - Figure Studies and Portraits

It's rare that I'm simultaneously pleasantly intrigued and completely nauseated by any work of art, much less that of a photographer. I've found myself puzzling over the works of Joel Peter-Witkin numerous times, but his use of corpses and weird religious tableaus provides an obvious explanation for why his work is so fascinating. Bill Durgin, on the other hand, uses live models contorted into odd positions to create rich figure studies that challenge commonly-held perceptions of the body as topped and dominated by the head. His figures rarely, if ever, have faces, and instead invite us lowly viewers to examine the form as a collection of parts, a mere assortment of muscles held tightly in check under dangerously thin skin. 

Although Durgin mainly focuses on figure study (both human and vegetable, oddly enough), his website does boast a nice assortment of "portraits and incidents" as well as a set of combination figure study/clothing advertisements. I actually find this last set most compelling, as the simplistic figure studies that I first mentioned tend to look more alien and vaguely disturbing, and leave me unsettled. Of course, 

it is an accomplishment for an artist to leave the viewer with questions, and though the figure studies and fashion advertisements are both similar in elements, they could not be more divergent in tone and purpose. The combination fashion/form study photographs combine the alien impersonality of the bare figures with the drapery of clothing, and give the photographer a freedom of composition and a context that the simplistic figure studies might lack. 

Conversely, the purpose of the fashion figures is of course to advertise the clothing, and Durgin's weird body composition is perhaps overshadowed by the clothes themselves. It is impossible to say which of Durgin's weird collections is objectively "better," simply because it remains up to each viewer to decide for him- or herself whether the disconcerting figure studies or the unorthodox fashion photography is more artistically persuasive.