pornography/forest_pics

pornography/forest-pics is a series of images based on hardcore pornographic images that are set within or around forests. The pictures were found on the Internet and downloaded, after which the human bodies were digitally removed.

The bodies are digitally removed from each shot by copying and repeating the surrounding landscape, creating visual scars within the image. Our gaze is redirected to the overlooked part of the image. The viewer is left to to complete the scene imaginatively.

The photographs, once denuded of their ‘action’, also bring to mind police forensic photography, as though these were the sites of forbidding, if unnamed, events. The forest settingcomplements this ambiguity: at once a place of beauty and danger, of obscuring and clearing, a public as well as a private space. Its quasi-repetition throughout the series both reproduces the banality of porn itself and elaborates a typography of spaces.

The human bodies get replaced by the ground and become earth, dust and debris.

See also: text written in response to the Proust themed exhibition 'Albertine goes South' curated by Rut Blees Luxemburg at Dorothee Schmid Gallery, London (GB), in 2006.