I-- I was doing editorial
work for a number of English magazines,
and some art director called me up and said,
Would you go and do a shoot on a porn set?
So, I went down there with my wife
I took her along for protection because I didnt know
what I would find there
It was a dentists house, and he had all his photographs
on the wall
Everything was-- was as if the dentist and his family
moved out for a day and this group of rowdy young people
moved in
Kind of a circus family moved in and took it over
and acted--
tried to act like a family,
but it was really a horny family, and a strange family
But the-- the--
just going to that house and walking through his rooms
and looking in his bedroom at what he had
on his dresser, I felt, oh boy--
I had really been squarely planted back into a terrain
that was so full of complications
So at that point I--
I mean, I was there for four hours shooting,
and I thought, oh man this is-- this is my next project
And it was--
I dont usually work so clearly
I felt that most of the ways in which we photographed
middle class life was so generic and so critical
and I didnt
want to make irony I wanted to do something that
was complicated, and dark, but also tender
And treated the suburbs, or my suburbs, LA, the valley,
as something quite compelling, and complicated, and rich
So it was--
it was to try to go from those kind of cold exteriors,
inside
What goes on inside
And theyre not erotic and yet theyre not purged
of sexuality
Theres something a little bit raw about them
Theres a bit of mischief, and theres a bit of darkness,
and theres a bit of desire, and theres a bit
of repulsion
To me the greatest moment I could elicit in a photograph
is just that kind of--
of what is that?
and to make them big enough that you confront them
with your body
I think of myself on porn sets as documenting fictions
Im using their-- I like the theatrical lighting,
I like their staging, I like that kind of weird theater
And yet, Im making those moments that are off, where
the drama isnt being targeted right
at that dramatic moment
Its the anti-dramatic moment, or a new kind of drama
My drama
Ive always been interested in banality
In the mundane
And I like the idea that in a-- on a porn
set, its not so different from a forensic photograph
Something has happened that has touched the place
And that the event has left, usually, a residue
Sometimes its a half-eaten piece of pie,
sometimes its some Kleenex, sometimes its a shoe
I like the fact that those clues give you
a sense of-- of an event,
and that the imagination is stirred by that
And so I didnt want to show the, ah, the explicit event
To me, I felt that there was so much wonderful things
around the event, the portraits of people
So its mostly people waiting around for their time
to go do their-- their, their scene
And heres this young girl, shes 18 or 19,
and trying this whole business on
Anyway, shes bored and shes sitting there
and-- and these two guys are asleep to the side of her,
and theres a scene going on behind her
But theres that one moment in all
photographs that, in a portrait,
is-- how do you get that moment where theres really
a bit of contact, something real
And she just looked over, and theres a vulnerability
to her that I think really
comes through in that photograph, and certainly
came through in life