Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

Site-specific frame-shift mutagenesis by the 1-nitropyrene-DNA adduct N-(deoxyguanosin-8-y1)-1-aminopyrene located in the (CG)3 sequence: effects of SOS, proofreading, and mismatch repair

1-Nitropyrene (1-NP), the predominant nitropolycyclic hydrocarbon found in diesel exhaust, is a mutagen and tumorigen. Nitroreduction is a major pathway by which 1-NP is metabolized. Reductively activated 1-NP forms a major DNA adduct, N-(deoxyguanosin-8-yl)-1-aminopyrene (dGAP), both in vitro and in vivo. In Salmonella typhimurium 1-NP induces a CpG deletion in a CGCGCGCG sequence. In Escherichia coli, however, mostly -1 and +1 frame-shifts are observed, which occur predominantly in 5'-CG, 5'-GC, and 5'-GG sequences. In order to determine the mechanism of mutagenesis by dGAP in a CpG repetitive sequence, we constructed a single-stranded M13 genome containing the adduct at the underscored deoxyguanosine of an inserted CGCGCG sequence. In E. coli strains with normal repair capability the adduct induced approximately 2% CpG deletions, which was 20-fold that of the control. With SOS, the frequency of frame-shift mutations increased to 2.6%, even though the frequency of CpG deletion accompanied 50% reduction. The enhancement in mutagenesis was due to a +1 frame-shift that occurred at a high frequency. In strains with a defect in methyl-directed mismatch repair, 50-70% increase in mutation frequency was observed. When these strains were SOS induced, frame-shift mutagenesis increased by approximately 100%. When transfections were carried out in dnaQ strains that are impaired in 3'-->5'exonuclease activity of DNA polymerase III, frame-shift mutagenesis increased 5-7-fold. dGAP-induced frame-shifts in the (CG)3 sequence, therefore, varied from 2% to 17% depending on the state of repair of the host cells. We conclude that dGAP induces both -2 and +1 frame-shifts in a CpG repetitive sequence and that these two mutagenic events are competing pathways. The CpG deletion does not require SOS functions, whereas the +1 frame-shifts are SOS-dependent. On the basis of the data in repair-deficient strains, it appears that both types of frame-shifts occurred as a result of misalignment, which are corrected primarily by the proofreading exonuclease of the DNA polymerase. Misaligned structures that escape the exonuclease are repaired by the methyl-directed mismatch repair, albeit with limited efficiency.     

Design of novel FN3 domains with high stability by a consensus sequence approach

The use of consensus design to produce stable proteins has been applied to numerous structures and classes of proteins. Here, we describe the engineering of novel FN3 domains from two different proteins, namely human fibronectin and human tenascin-C, as potential alternative scaffold biotherapeutics. The resulting FN3 domains were found to be robustly expressed in Escherichia coli, soluble and highly stable, with melting temperatures of 89 and 78°C, respectively. X-ray crystallography was used to confirm that the consensus approach led to a structure consistent with the FN3 design despite having only low-sequence identity to natural FN3 domains. The ability of the Tenascin consensus domain to withstand mutations in the loop regions connecting the β-strands was investigated using alanine scanning mutagenesis demonstrating the potential for randomization in these regions. Finally, rational design was used to produce point mutations that significantly increase the stability of one of the consensus domains. Together our data suggest that consensus FN3 domains have potential utility as alternative scaffold therapeutics.     

Rumination and cigarette smoking: A bad combination for depressive outcomes?

Ruminative coping has been shown to heighten the risk and severity of depression. The authors hypothesized that ruminators who smoke would experience greater depressive symptoms than ruminators who do not. The rationale is that, by heightening attentional focus, nicotine may increase ruminators' ability to focus on negative thoughts, augmenting depressed mood. Participants (N = 145) self-reported smoking status, rumination, and current and lifetime depressive symptoms, including depressed mood. Results showed that rumination accounted for a larger amount of variance in current and past depressed mood and severity of lifetime depressive symptoms among smokers than nonsmokers. Noncorrelational, experimental research should directly test whether nicotine worsens depressed mood among ruminative smokers. Such evidence would be surprising because it would contradict the assumption that nicotine dispels negative moods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lewis Carroll's Barker and his daughter May and the legend of Aristotle and Phyllis

Abstract

When Lewis Carroll died, a young woman who had been one of his ‘child-friends’ explained that, like the mirror-letters he sometimes wrote, ‘he was a man whom one had to read backwards’, a man that had to be looked at ‘As Through a Looking Glass’.¹ Certainly Carroll was a man that few understood. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson seemed to be a walking contradiction. The stiff, rectitudinous mathematician and logician, who gave ‘dull-as-ditchwater’ lectures at Christ Church, Oxford,² was in sharp contrast to the man who delighted in the whimsical and paradoxical — author of Alice in Wonderland, inventor of word games, and writer of satirical pamphlets. He was also, in the words of the great photographer Brassaï, ‘the most remarkable photographer of children in the nineteenth century’.³ These photographs, most often images of Carroll's young female friends, are indeed remarkable. Yet they are also decidedly complex and paradoxical, producing in the modem viewer a high degree of psychological discord. On the one hand they are charming, personal portraits of children; on the other, they evoke something mature, sensual and alarmingly intimate.     

Understanding Others: The Face and Person Construal.

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Impulsivity and smoking relapse.

Previous research has shown that elevated trait-impulsivity heightens the risk for initiating tobacco use and indicates that nicotine may be disproportionately rewarding for more impulsive persons. However, the influence of impulsivity on the ability to maintain nicotine abstinence has not been studied. The present study tested the hypothesis that a higher level of trait-impulsivity would predict a more rapid relapse to smoking following 48 hr of nicotine abstinence. Participants were euthymic, regular smokers (N=45), with a history of at least one major depressive episode, who participated in a paid smoking cessation study with biological challenge (tryptophan depletion). Treatment involved a 1-day skills training workshop followed by 48 hr of bioverified abstinence and weekly follow-up for 1 month. Regression analyses indicated that elevated impulsivity predicted shorter time to relapse following the workshop after controlling for treatment condition, baseline nicotine dependence, and age (beta=-.39, R(2) change=.147, p=.011). Greater impulsivity predicted more rapid relapse to smoking, which mediational analyses indicated could not be explained by positive affect, negative affect, or craving. Findings suggest a need to identify alternative mechanisms to explain impulsive smokers' increased difficulty in maintaining abstinence and to develop targeted treatments that address the special needs of smokers high in impulsivity.