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.
The series was started in 2004 and further images were added until 2013. Each picture is printed small (around 12cm x 18cm), similar to its original size on the computer screen. They are framed in walnut frames with a passepartout. Each picture is available in an edition of 5.
Eva Stenram produces images that make a healthy mockery of the very idea of location, in more ways than one. The photographs included here are, on first sight, a loose group of fairly pretty forest landscapes. Light dapples through trees onto sites good for picnics or a rest on a country walk. On closer inspection the images break up into the blocks of colour we associate with low-resolution digital files. Stenram has visited porn websites, downloaded photos and ‘removed’ the human bodies to leave us with empty stages. ‘Bare’ landscapes, if you will. Should we be attempting to re-imagine what was there or is it best to presume it was as formulaic and predictable as the settings? Are we being protected coyly from something, or encouraged to enjoy it in its absence?
– David Campany, exhibition essay for "This must be the Place" at Jerwood Space, London (GB).
Exhibited here in Screen Age II (Landscape), Riga Photography Biennale 2020, Riga Arts Space, Riga (LV).
photograph from Diena Newspaper, October 10, 2020.