A few weeks back I was contacted by Diane Smyth the editor of the
British Journal of Photography to do an interview on erotic art. She found my UK agent Mark Davis of
Obsession Art wanted to speak with me about my thoughts on porn vs fine art. This magazine is one of the top rated photographic journals in the UK I was floored when I got the email from her to set up the phone call. She will be at the
Erotic Awards this Sat. said that she would root for me to win, I am one of the four finalists in the photographer category. I am waiting to get my print version of the magazine with my images published but below is the on-line version of the article she wrote about me & some other great photographers...
Erotic photography is coming out of the shadows and into the mainstream, finds Diane Smyth, helped along by the internet and changing attitudes to sexuality...
A new film version of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lady Chatterley, opened in the UK on 24 August and among the many quotes used in its British publicity campaign was this description from The Sunday Times: 'an erotic love story of great beauty. Eroticism, it seems, has now become so acceptable that it's a selling point for a mainstream, if art house, film which, given that Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned under obscenity laws until 1960, is quite a shift in attitude.
But if erotic fiction and film are heading into the mainstream, is erotic photography? Or is it still an art form subsumed by its brasher and more covert cousin, pornography? Mark Davis, who set up erotic prints site www.obsessionart.com two years ago thinks the former - and says photographers and galleries are failing to meet demand.
It's an underdeveloped area, he says. If you're in London, and know the right photographers or galleries you could probably find what you were looking for. But most people don't have a clue where to start. I started Obsession Art because I couldn't find the kind of artwork I wanted for my own house. After searching for a few hours online I thought: "I can't be the only person having this problem"
Art v porn
For Davis there is a clear difference between the work that he sells and pornography. "The images we sell are more intellectual" he says. "Pornography is instant gratification, erotic images have a more intellectual approach and can appeal to you intellectually."
The photographers whose work he distributes agree. Lochai, for example, whose work has reached the final of this year's Erotic Awards, considers his work fine art. "Porn is something that provokes a physical sexual response," he states. "Fine art may do that but it's also emotional and engages the mind. I think Obsession is bringing erotic art to a wider audience and I'm very proud that I've been able to bring fetish to the mainstream."
Mick Payton, who is another contributor, says he considers it a straight insult if he's called a pornographer. "I'm 54 and I've got old-fashioned standards," he says. "I don't ask models to open up and show everything, in fact they're often quite covered up. That's the tease aspect. With porn, there is no tease. The atmosphere is cold and brutal."
Payton adds that he usually shoots in monochrome, whereas pornography is nearly always shot in colour. Whether he's right about pornography or not, he's certainly right about the erotic work on sale on the Obsession Art site - Davis says that only about 5% of the work on it is colour. "Photographers working in this area often choose black-and-white, although we'd be happy to have more colour," he says.
Despite what he sees as these clear differences, Payton believes erotic photography is still misunderstood in the UK. He says a still-prevalent macho culture is to blame, and is dismissive of the so-called lads magazines" which he believes perpetuate it. Davis shares his concerns about these titles and the photography they publish - but also concedes that their existence may have helped encourage mainstream acceptance of nudity.
"Men's magazines in the 1970s such as Penthouse did erotic photography really well," he says. "They were very upmarket and very well written, as well as featuring images of beautiful women, but they were top shelf titles. In the 1990s magazines such as Loaded started up, with a much less intellectual approach, and then came Nuts and Zoo. It made nude images more acceptable but it's very different from what I want to do."
Prints
Obsession Art hopes to differentiate itself through the quality of the prints it sells - and the fact that it sells prints, rather than distributing electronic images. Perhaps surprisingly, this is another key differentiator for many erotic photographers. Lochai, for example, is happy to display his images online to attract print sales, but equates online image sales with pornography.
"I want to create a beautiful print to be hung on collectors' wall, not something for the internet," he says. "I'm not interested in making things for computers. I want to make work that has nuances, that you can come back to. Images for the internet don't have nuances, they have to be very straight forward. When people look at images online it's less about the photography than about beautiful bodies."
William R Bullock, another Erotic Awards finalist and the photographer behind the latex picture (page 21) has a similar approach. "I usually sell numbered, limited edition prints," he says. "I have had a number of one-man and group exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne. My website has a few small samples of the variety of my work and I can be contacted through it for more information."
Female customers
Davis, though, points out that the internet has helped sell erotic art as much as it has helped sell pornography, because it allows customers to source images anonymously, and far from their local area. "Where someone might be embarrassed to go to a gallery, they can search online," he says. "And it also comes back to accessibility - how many galleries are there in the average town?"
Jan Findlater, who has worked at the Erotic Print Society for nine years, says the internet has changed her work too. The EPS was set up in 1994 by gallerist Jamie Maclean and, says Findlater, is now attracting far more female customers in the past - something that she partly puts down to the internet.
"Our audience has really changed," she says. "More and more women are buying prints. It's partly to do with their increasing spending power, but also because it's more acceptable for women to buy erotic material, and because of the internet. I think women feel free to browse online where they might feel embarrassed to buy a catalogue or go on a mailing list.
"The are interesting differences though. Our male customers tend to be between 50 and 60, but our female customers are usually between 30-40. And the women who buy tend to be in couples buying something to share with their partner, rather than single women buying for themselves."
And one thing remains the same whether the imagery is erotic or pornographic, and whether it&'s bought by men or women: the majority of the photographers shooting the work are male, and the majority of models are female. According to Davis that&'s not intentional - in fact, he would like to have more erotic images of men.
"We sell pictures of men and women but there are far more images of women," he says. "There's no specific reason why, it's just that the majority of photographers shoot women. But we're actively trying to build up our collection of male photographs - only 5% of the images we sell are of men, but only 2% of the images on the site are of men, so we know that what we do have sells well.
"I would say though that of the women buying from our site, many are buying images for their partners," he adds. "We want to build up our collection of photographs of men so that we can tap into the gay market."
Davis adds that photographers who have tried to shoot men have found it difficult to get hold of male models, and have found it difficult to get them into good poses when they've found them. Findlater suggests this is because men getting into erotic positions is, well, just not erotic.
"We find that images of men don't sell particularly well to either men or women," she says. "The passive man is not really considered attractive."
And interestingly this holds true even when the photographer involved is female. Jessica Rhoder, for example, got into erotic photography by shooting a series of self-portraits, and is predominantly shooting women for a book commissioned by the EPS.
"I've photographed men and it was nice, but I certainly think that women are much sexier,' she says. "We've got more choice about what we wear, lacy underwear or beautiful heels, so we can change our look. Also we don't necessarily have to be displaying our genitals to evoke something sexy, whereas with men you almost have to see it all. For the book I want to create something that women can relate to, something about women for women."
But if women still make up the vast majority of the erotic models, the type of woman used, and the way in which she is depicted, has changed. "I think the women photographed look much more confident now," says Findlater. "They look less passive, and somehow stronger.
"But the women in photography from the 1970s photography look more natural too. They had flaws, but they also looked more individual. Now the women look much more homogenous, they have breast implants and nips and tucks. We try to avoid that kind of image - our customers don't like it. They think women with flaws are sexy."
Future perfect
Perhaps the last word belongs to Mofo though, an Obsession Art contributor at the age of just 27. Shooting in both black-and-white and colour, Mofo depicts strong, confident-looking women whose looks are worlds away from the homogenous pornographic style. More transgressive still, he doesn't consider his work erotic, publishing it in non-erotic titles such as iD, TimeOut and the NME. He is, perhaps, the ultimate example of erotic photography's move into the mainstream.
"I want to take sexy photographs with a sense of humour and sense of fashion," he says. "I don't know if I'd call it erotic. If someone says erotic to me I think of this sort of classic black-and-white, which isn't really what I do. I just want to do my own thing."
OnlineFor more information about Obsession Art and the photographers quoted here represented by the site, visit www.obsessionart.com .
For more information about the Erotic Print Society and Jessica Rhoder, visit www.eroticprints.com . The Erotic Review, which is published by the Erotic Print Society, recently announced a competition to find the Erotic Photographer of the Year. For more information, visit www.erphoto.org .
The finals of the Erotic Awards are announced on 01 September at an event called the Night of the Senses. For more information visit www.erotic-awards.co.uk .
Lochai can be found at [link] .
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