Almost Porn

So, this weekend I set out on a new venture. I set up the lighting.  I oiled up the girls and I created a bad plot.  It took me a few shots to realize that the angles were all wrong.  I am used to shots that cut off heads or parts of heads. I like cropping body parts and I like drastic lighting. That doesn't really work when going for the glossy aesthetic I was attempting.  But, I kept altering my style and I pushed through 4 hours of shooting in an attempt to make porn.

Photo from James Gunn's PG Porn

Afterward, I felt the way I do after most shoots.  I was unsure of what my work would yield.  In the same shoot, I shot with my Nikon D5000, my Canon AE-1, my cell phone and a recently purchased Holga (medium format) camera. Shooting with the intent of replicating porn was not easy. I saw replicating, because I was not making actual porn.  I wasn't given a budget.  I didn't have the right target audience in mind, my models aren't trying to make a buck or break into acting.  They were just friends willing to do me a favor that would yield nudes they could show their boyfriends.  I didn't have access to a house in Miami.  So, what I was attempting was to recreate an aesthetic that would get me as close to porn as possible. Which poses an interesting question; if the photos I took weren't porn, what were they?

The next day, I ran some text prints to see what came out.  I had an interesting finding.  The shoot started off awkward and uncomfortable.  The photos revealed this.  My angles were off.  I am used to shooting in a certain way and so I had to make some adjustments. But, what I realized when printing the photos was that there are two important factors in creating a porn aesthetic: sequencing and facial expressions. The photos I had of the women straddling each other didn't feel as much like magazine porn as the photos of them looking a book topless, because the facial expressions were off. But, once I put that photo next to the one with a doe-eyed college student studying, an overly literal narrative was formed and the photos started taking shape. Mind you, they still weren't porn, but they had more of the aesthetic of porn.

But, the whole venture left me with the question, What am I asking of my viewer? What is it about nudity in photography that makes the shots easily categorizable? What makes it pornography?  What makes it art?  What makes it humiliation? And how can I blur the lines of the intimate, the humiliating, the titillating and the informative, to offer something that poses a problem for the viewer?

http://www.spike.com/hub/pgporn