No Love Lost
‘I am in love’s wrong place,
which is its dazzling place:
The darkest place
according to a Chinese proverb,
is always
underneath the lamp.’ (Reik)
– Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse
No Love Lost is a visual project that inhabits heightened sexual environments in contemporary England. People featured are active in the increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping. What they share is a measured psychological engagement with strangers in close proximity that is a purely physical and sexual union lacking in affection. Fantasy is played out within the frame of constraints and closeness is kept at a distance. Menace is always present, control is often threatened. These are emotionally charged settings, both plastic and primitive, where the ‘stuff’ of life is all too present.
No Love Lost is a complex body of work about intimacy and dislocation in a theatre of sexual commodity. These are real fictional encounters that convey a sense of the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments.
– Michael Grieve, 2008
With its melancholic overtones and purposeful imprecisions, No Love Lost certainly possesses a strange and uneasy beauty, but also through its allusions to atmosphere over action, it raises innumerable questions about how we relate to one another – physically, sexually, socially and psychologically – transforming such beauty into something more primal and profound. And as the porn stars (lady in red), preferred philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, once wrote. ‘To experience a thing as beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly’.
– Aaron Schuman, British Journal of Photography, 2008
which is its dazzling place:
The darkest place
according to a Chinese proverb,
is always
underneath the lamp.’ (Reik)
– Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse
No Love Lost is a visual project that inhabits heightened sexual environments in contemporary England. People featured are active in the increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping. What they share is a measured psychological engagement with strangers in close proximity that is a purely physical and sexual union lacking in affection. Fantasy is played out within the frame of constraints and closeness is kept at a distance. Menace is always present, control is often threatened. These are emotionally charged settings, both plastic and primitive, where the ‘stuff’ of life is all too present.
No Love Lost is a complex body of work about intimacy and dislocation in a theatre of sexual commodity. These are real fictional encounters that convey a sense of the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments.
– Michael Grieve, 2008
With its melancholic overtones and purposeful imprecisions, No Love Lost certainly possesses a strange and uneasy beauty, but also through its allusions to atmosphere over action, it raises innumerable questions about how we relate to one another – physically, sexually, socially and psychologically – transforming such beauty into something more primal and profound. And as the porn stars (lady in red), preferred philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, once wrote. ‘To experience a thing as beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly’.
– Aaron Schuman, British Journal of Photography, 2008
