Whoever did these photos really, really understands what women want. There’s no rippling muscles or pouting at the camera or crotch shots; instead, there’s a soft-eyed long-haired man reading a book in an underwater paradise. Whoever did this looked at all of the media produced and aimed at women and concluded, correctly, that Mr Darcy coming out of the water in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice is where human sexuality peaked.
I truly don’t understand how the female gaze is still so hard for the media to nail down when the Simpsons gave them such big hints.
Kudos to this gorgeous girl (Lucy Nuzum) for doing god’s job:
So here’s the thing, not only did he have a woman doing the photography (and I suspect made that decision on purpose–if you flip through his old photoshoots you can tell he’s more comfortable with a woman behind the camera), his mum is his art director, and he’s like super hella proud to have her doing that job and basically she says stuff and he just goes “sounds good, I trust you.”
So Lucy Nuzum did an amazing photography job, but it was Raine Hozier-Byrne who went “what exactly can I do to meet both the album themes and the desires of his fanbase, which is 98% women and 2% gay men and other queer people who aren’t women,” and came up with “I know, let’s try to make him look like a drowning Oscar Wilde.”
