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I think of making photographs as a performance, a visual construction site. My first photographic project was an extension of my sculptural practice. I created a fantasy photo shoot with New York porn celebrity Annie Sprinkle, using my Harley as a machine pedestal on which she posed as a biker chick while I pretended to photograph her. I exhibited the resulting photographs (taken by two other photographers), along with the bike. The process of setting up a shoot and interacting with my models is a private scene that will have a wider audience later. I can act out my butch-bottom fantasies with my femme top or other butches, but ultimately I am the top butch as the photographer. I decide what the camera sees, and then what gets shown. I get a vicarious thrill from inspecting the costumes my models bring with them in order to play out their own biker and biker-chick fantasies. It brings out the best of the voyeur and exhibitionist in us all. My fantasy allows my models and me to claim a space that we might not ordinarily occupy. The photographs afford us a chance to remake and queer that space, if only for the click of the shutter. (1)

William Simon quoting Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book Postmodern Sexualities said "A man can bare himself before others only out of a kind of love. A love which acknowledges, as it were, that we are all wicked children." (2)

Grace Lau in her Adults In Wonderland says that, "To place my work in a personal context, my own cultural conditioning was a strong force and once I started to consider male nudes as photo subjects, I was sharply aware of the effects of strict upbringing in my youth. Paradoxically, my inhibition actually led to an urgent curiosity to investigate lust and libido, using photography as a medium -- perhaps even as a spatial protection to start with. For the camera necessarily required a technical distance between the photographer and the subject and this distance provided a safe space for me to explore sex and erotica. Curiosity did not overrule a certain trepidation."(3)

Photographing is as much about the thrill of having the power to get women to pose for and with me as it is about producing the final images. Everyone is acting out both my and their own erotic fantasies embedded in the outlaw look of biker culture. The shoots themselves are erotically charged, which can even make working in a cold damp studio a pleasure. As with porn stars and actresses, we all know that these pictures have little to do with any reality outside the performance of a very specific and subjective desire. My brand of desire is both serious and serious fun: serious, in that it intertwines class appropriation, gender play, and sexual preference in order to represent a certain range of my fantasies; serious fun in that I know that I am fabricating a pictorial fantasy that turns me on. It is difficult to find the right combination of exposure, subtlety, and play that adequately represents what I am trying to express. There are times when I feel that this work is a fool's errand, given the social and political times in which we live. But then I regain my butch swagger and continue to pursue my belief in the importance of imagining desires that this society would prefer to erase. (4)

The photographer's participation cannot be understated and the ultimate imagery that transpires is frequently an unscripted collaboration between real-life subjects and photographer. My camera does more than observe and document; my camera participates actively. (5)

To the continuing frustration of conventional behaviorists, individual behavior increasingly must be viewed not as the text of a fact but as a complex outcome for which no one defining label can have assured universal meaning. Clearly, there are more reasons for being sexual than ways of being sexual. (6)

A Haida photographer went around taking pictures with an empty camera: what was vital was the ritual posing before the camera, not that spoor, the photograph. (7)

The camera as catalyst is a phenomenon that I have become progressively more aware of, and acting in a cathartic role is another unexpected feature of my work. Although most of my clients clearly do not come to me as "patients", they feel sufficiently comfortable in my presence to reveal their fantasies as long as I respond to and acknowledge their masquerade. At times, I feel I have become the mirror for my cross-dressing clients, reflecting back their feminine beauty, even though I am actually looking at a rough, heavily-jowled and painfully shaven masculine face with pursed over-lipsticked mouth and layered foundation. But by engaging with their masquerade, I provide the necessary assurance that they crave. (8)

Jessica Benjamin in Like Subjects, Love Objects, tells us that "Recognition means that the other is mentally placed in the position of a different, outside entity but shares a similar feeling or state of mind. Separate minds and bodies can attune. In erotic union this attunement can be so intense that the separation between self and other feels momentarily suspended: self and other are fused. The sense of losing the self in the other and that of really being known for oneself can be reconciled. This sense of simultaneously losing the self and retaining wholeness IS often called oneness and is often described as the ultimate point of erotic union. The desire for erotic union with another person who is endowed with the capacity to transform the self can be seen as the most intense version of the desire for recognition. When both individuals experience themselves as being transformed by the other, or by what they create in conjunction with the other, a choreography emerges that is not reducible to the idea of reacting to the outside. The experience is one not only of sensual pleasure, which can be felt in a state of aloneness or indifference to the other's existence, but of co-creation and mutual recognition. In erotic union the point is to contact and be contacted by the other apprehended 
as such."(9)

A few male (photography) clients have tried to involve me in their fantasy games. Here again, I would have felt a loss of personal control or, still worse, loss of photographic direction. So I have generally refused, although I have grave suspicions that some of them managed to manipulate a situation where I have to tie them up in so many different fashions that they have actually underpaid my services! (10)

The picture does not create desire, desire creates the picture. The picture evokes desire, but only the desire that was lying in wait. (11)

I felt compelled to carry on photographing, and from the fringe of the activity I began to move in closer and closer. At times, I felt as if I was almost part of the act and my role was somehow also written into the script The scene was infectious. Eventually, I even felt drawn to join in some of the action and adopted the mistress masquerade. But I felt more comfortable with my camera than a cane, and the power of wielding my camera to stimulate such uninhibited action was my own power-trip: my camera was my cane. (12)

place which can he filled in by the gaze of the spectator (or camera) witnessing the act. This elementary pornographic scene (a woman, twisted in an anamorphic way, displaying her sex to the camera as well as looking at it) also confronts the spectator with (what Lacan calls) the split between eye and gaze at its purest: the actress or model staring at the spectator stands for the eye. while the open hole of the vagina stands for the traumatic gaze -- that is to say, it is from this gaping hole that the scene the spectator is witnessing returns the gaze to him. The gaze is thus not where one would expect it (in the eyes staring at us from the picture) but in the traumatic object/hole which transfixes our look and concerns us most intensely -- the model's eyes staring at us here are, rather, to remind us: 'You see, I'm watching you observing my gaze . .'

 S. Zizek in The Plague of Fantasies says that 'The lesson of pornography is thus more important than it may appear: it concerns the way in which jouissance is torn between the Symbolic and the Real. On the one hand, jouissance is 'private', the kernel which resists public disclosure (look how embarrassing it is to us when our intimate modes of enjoyment, private tics, etc., are publicly disclosed); On the other hand, however, jouissance 'counts' only as registered by the big Other; it tends in itself towards this inscription (from public boasting to a confession to one's closest friend). The discord between the two extremes is irreducible: between the In-itself of the purely 'private pleasure' excluded from the public gaze and the For itself of a wholly externalized sex, of a sex openly staged for the public gaze -- there is always 'something missing' in the first one, while the second one is always experienced as 'faked'. This inherent reference to the Other on account of which 'there is no Don Giovanni without Leporello' (Don Giovanni obviously rates the inscription of his conquests into Leporello's register higher than the pleasure provided by the conquests themselves) is the theme of a low-class joke on a poor peasant who, after enduring a shipwreck, finds himself on a desert island with Cindy Crawford. After having sex with her, she asks him if he is fully satisfied; his answer is yes, but none the less he still has a small request to make his satisfaction complete -- could she dress herself up as his best friend, put on trousers and paint a moustache on her face? In response to her surprised reaction and suspicion that the poor peasant is a hidden pervert, he comforts her that this is not the point at all, as she will immediately see .... So, after she fulfills his request, he approaches her, elbows her in the ribs and tells her, with the obscene smile of male complicity: 'You know what just happened to me? I had sex with Cindy Crawford!'. This Third, which is always present as the witness, belies the ideal of hedonism -- that is, it introduces the moment of reflexivity on account of which unspoiled innocent private pleasure is never possible: sex is always minimally 'exhibitionist', it relies on the gaze of an other. (13)

1.Stephens, E. Looking-Class Heroes in Bright, D., Passionate Camera, Routledge, 1998 2. Simon, W. Postmodern Sexualities. Routledge, 1996. 3. Lau, G. Adults in Wonderland. Serpents Tail, 1997. 4. Stephens, E. in Passionate Camera

Folsom St. Fair, 1999 Photo from Mario and Maria,  our Brazilian sponsors.