The frog crawling on stomach is torn and smiles.

I'm not sure if I'd call the break from posting "refreshing," exactly. Maybe that's why I enjoy the occasional breakneck rate; the moment I slow down I lose momentum, go blank, feel mentally tired of the subject matter I'd been planning out (This gets planned?!), and almost instantly start to dislike my output. Writing and posting in an evening is automatic, without time to reflect, which seems to be an advantage when it comes to... well, this.

Anyway, as I said, I'm feeling like a change. We've kind of quietly and sheepishly circled around a direct examination of outright pornographic material in the past, and I thought that in an effort to move laterally we'd look at something different. Not old dead ladies, smiling in vintage undies, not cute, vapid looking Japanese girls with extraordinarily artificial smiles and surgical augmentation, expensive flashes, and a rigid application of pixelated censoring of any kind of vaginal exposure and yet, curiously, non of rectal. No. We're Americans. Our surgery is more cut-rate, our starlets less "bodicon," thank heavens. Pop-shots, DP, USA.



I found a professional porn industry writer who also takes snapshots of the sets and events he visits. He calls himself Gram Ponante online.

In a way, finding him was kind of a dream come true. One of the greatest forms of awkward boredom is that exhibited by adult performers between takes. Somehow it seems to never lose its charm. It's unfortunately rather difficult to view these actors and actresses in a non artificial situation, behavior, or environment. Stuff like this, to me, is gold.





It's also interesting if you happen to be an engaged viewer of the history of pornography. A lot of these casual snaps and between-take portraits would have been considered more than pornographic enough in their own right less than 70 years ago. Now, they fall somewhere between raunchy vacation photos and adventurous "profile pics." Vernacular imagery from a culture so steeped in ritualized and Photoshopped (I almost wrote airbrushed) sexual iconography as to become inseparable from the constant buzz of "the pitch." All of our media, just drowning in its indulgence.





I know that there's something significant in that I find some of these images no less technically successful than your typical Richardson, Teller, or Kern portrait, despite the fact that their taker has absolutely zero in the way of, you know... that whole thing. He's not shooting GQ covers and unexciting author bio photos, let's say. He's a guy, going to work. Much like the people he's photographing. The only outlet for such pictures are adult industry specific media, and who the fuck looks at that outside of the industry?

Always with the context. Put these snaps in Purple, Vogue, The Nation, a Vitamin Water billboard, hanging on the wall of ICP, or strewn across the endless desert of Internet culture, discarded. Historians and philosophers will at least have something fun to do a century from now.


Perhaps one of the reasons I continue to enjoy looking at the nude as a subject is that, when it's presented to me as such, it's always narcotizing in how boring it is. And yet somehow, with a slight alteration in its context, a change in working method (the actual shooting of the pictures), when you take nudity and turn it into a blue collar uniform....

Oh, Ms. Waters. Um... need another High Life? One sec.