| I have always had a staring problem. It took me a long time, but eventually I realized that if you photograph someone you have a really good excuse to sit them in front of you and just look at them. |  |
Autumn Sonnichsen
I have always had a staring problem. It took me a long time, but eventually I realized that if you photograph someone you have a really good excuse to sit them in front of you and just look at them. I’m a big fan of looking.
I take a lot of photographs. I take them instinctively, mostly because they occur to me, and partly because, modesty aside, I think that I’m good at it. It gives you a good reason to go to fantastic places in fantastic company. A photograph can be an excuse for anything.
I’m not interested in defining my work as pornographic, though people have said that about it, and I don’t really mind. My work has generally been sexy in one way or another, though not necessarily sexually explicit. There are animalistic elements to sexual work, the separation from and reliance upon the body that I find very appealing. The chord that is struck when the soft animal of our bodies is stroked. Porn is about dreams, about incorporating them, about documenting the surreal, in a way. Everything exists; people dream of certain women and situations because they exist somewhere, are embodied somewhere. Women are able to build their own bodies.
I’ve always been interested in the ways and degrees to which people valorize beauty, and in people who deal with that on a daily basis. When I began to photograph women who have a direct financial relationship to their beauty, my work became clearer, the ideas more easily defined. I love strippers, prostitutes, porn stars, and fashion models. All of these labels are different degrees of the same idea, the idea of trying to define, definitively and unsuccessfully, the price of beauty, and who is willing to pay it.
Then there is the fear of forgetting, the cock-envy, the wanderlust. Then there is the laziness. I don’t think that this is a coherent statement, but if you ask anyone who they are, and why they do what they do, if they give you a reasonable answer they’re probably lying.
