Erotic by nature

In your view, what are the key differences between fine-art sexual photography and porn?

The basic purpose of porn is to be a masturbation aid largely for men, to provide images that turn people on and help them get off. The basic purpose of fine-art sexual photography is not to arouse people (though that may happen) but to say something truthful about sex and about who we are as sexual beings. A.D. Coleman, the photo critic who wrote the foreword to "Photo Sex," says he wants a sexual photograph to have a point of view, to say something about sex beyond the simple fact that sex is happening and we get to watch. I think that hits the nail on the head.

Sex is such a complex and important part of life. Does anyone really understand it? What makes it so powerful, so confusing, so exciting, so frightening? It's more than lots of nerve endings firing at the same time.

One of the functions of art is to talk about big, complex issues in big, complex ways -- to help us appreciate life in ways that are unreachable through academic treatises, technical manuals, or literal narratives. What's revolutionary about fine-art sexual photography is that it applies the intelligence we associate with fine art to the complicated subject of sex.

The book includes the work of 31 photographers. How did you find them? How did you decide whom to include?

I've been Cupido's photo rep in the U.S. for 14 years, and have been writing about erotic and sexual photography for most of that time. Through that work, I met the people I call the "new sexual photographers." Finding skillful photographers was not difficult. The most difficult task in editing "Photo Sex" was finding ways to represent the diversity of sex in just 115 photographs. I managed to cull about 600 favorite images down to about 250.

The final criterion that let me get the book down to workable size, suggested to me by my good friend, photographer Mark I. Chester, was to demand that each photograph make a unique contribution to the book, that it have a particular magic no other photograph had.

Can you describe the range of sexual imagery in "Photo Sex"?

It's all over the map. Some of the photos are journalistic, others are intensely intimate and personal. Some are warm and tender, others are confrontational. Some of the sexual activities are familiar: dancing, kissing, touching, intercourse, masturbation, or voyeurism. Others may be seen by some people as radical, even disturbing: S/M, group sex, sex in public places.

I hope viewers will think of the people in the photos as people like themselves, even if the ways they express themselves sexually might be very different from viewers' own sexual tastes. It's not my desire to shock anyone, but at the same time I didn't want to restrict "Photo Sex" to images that everyone could view without any discomfort. I want it to celebrate sexual variation. There are heterosexuals, gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals. There are young and old people, fat and thin people, people with disabilities, people from a wide range of races and ethnicities. There are couples, people alone, threesomes and groups, people having sex in the privacy of their homes, in sex clubs, even out on the streets.

Some of the photographers focus on tenderness and intimacy, others on fierceness and intensity. Some images are softly focused, others sharply graphic. There's humor, sadness, irony, strength, vulnerability -- the whole gamut of emotions involved in being sexual. The photographers express their own particular fascination with sex in their own unique ways.

What about Robert Mapplethorpe? Why doesn't his work appear in "Photo Sex"? What do you think of it? Is it fine-art sexual photography?

Oh, yes, definitely, Mapplethorpe's work is fine art. He was a very significant figure in the trend toward fine-art sexual photogaphy. I saw his retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1988, and was completely blown away. His images were so sexual, and so controversial, and they were being shown in the hallowed halls of a major museum. It's not every day that you see huge beautiful photos of people having oral sex, or engaged in S/M at the Whitney. On the one hand, his show was a major breakthrough -- and I should add that everywhere it appeared, the public liked and supported it. But, on the other hand, it generated enormous political and legal controversy because it coupled the S/M images, which were controversial enough, with two nonsexual photographs of naked toddlers. The upshot was that, in Congress, Jesse Helms attacked the show. The Corcoran canceled it. And the curator of the Cincinnati Art Center was brought up on obscenity charges. He was acquitted, but that kind of controversy set fine-art sexual photography back because it made -- and still makes -- galleries and museums reluctant to show this type of work.

I wanted to include some Mapplethorpe photographs in "Photo Sex." But unfortunately, his estate wanted more for the rights than I could afford, so I couldn't include him.

A few of your photos appear in the book, exuberant shots of joyous sexual play, your subjects often sporting broad grins. How long have you been taking sexual photographs? What are you trying to show? And how do you persuade couples to make love with you standing over them?

I'm probably the least experienced photographer in the book. For Cupido, I've brokered thousands of sexual photographs by hundreds of photographers. I like their work. But inevitably, their perspectives are different from mine. For a while, I tried to coax the photographers I knew best into capturing what interested me most about sex -- intimacy, tenderness, love, joy, the emotional connection between lovers, more than their physical coupling. But of course, they wanted to pursue their visions of sex, not mine. So I decided to try my hand at creating the kind of sexual photographs I wanted to see.

I'd taken family photos and vacation snapshots all my life, and people told me I had a decent eye for composition. But I never saw myself as a photographer. I had almost no technical training. But I was intrigued with the question of how to get people to be comfortable, real and sexually open in the presence of a third person and a camera.

I asked some friends if I could photograph them, and they agreed to be my guinea pigs. We did a long shoot -- all afternoon and into the evening. We had a wonderful time and, to my surprise, produced some images that captured their sexual connection. When I showed the prints to other couples, several asked to model for me. The same thing happened. The couples were all able to be remarkably open, even though I was fluttering around them, moving lights, sometimes standing practically on top of them, snapping away. Each couple was different, but from each shoot, something genuine and personal emerged.

Cupido began publishing my photographs. They even put one on the cover. That was tremendously validating. Since then, sexual photography has been at the center of my creative life. In the last four years, I've photographed 40 couples, and I'm finding that other magazines and book publishers are interested in my work.

None of the subjects in the book are professional models. They're all ordinary people. Why does fine art sex photography focus on ordinary folks?

For me, the most powerful art is work that talks about real life, about universal emotions, not about the rarefied glitz of being a celebrity, of being "special." Despite what the media tell us, most "ordinary" people are both sexual and sexy. I wanted "Photo Sex" to reflect that. The photos show that there are many more loving, wonderful ways to be sexual than what we see on TV, in the movies, or in porn. In my view, sexual diversity is cause for celebration.

If fine-art sexual photography is, indeed, "coming of age," then are art and photography galleries more interested in showing it than they were, say, 10 years ago?

Most museums, galleries and photography publications are still very afraid of sexual images. Many of the photographers in the book have told me of going to photo shows where gallery representatives and museum curators say they love their work but could never show it. I hope that the collective power and beauty of the images in "Photo Sex" help legitimize sexual fine-art photography, but it's definitely an uphill climb.

There has already been one exhibit of prints from photo sex at a small San Francisco gallery, and Good Vibrations in San Francisco is going to exhibit them through the end of the year. Several other traditional galleries are considering mounting shows. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

It's important to understand that how we think of sex, and how we think of ourselves as sexual, is shaped by the images we see around us. Images that trivialize sex -- what we generally see on TV -- encourage us to regard sex as simplistic. Images that portray sex as naughty and forbidden -- most pornography -- encourage us to think of sexual desire as suspect and dangerous. But images like the ones in "Photo Sex" that portray sex as joyous, nurturing, intimate and ecstatic, encourage us to think of sex as a source of warmth, pleasure and emotional satisfaction. They encourage us to open ourselves to sex as multifaceted, deep and powerful.

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