$29.95
ISBN 086719460X
available through
Amazon
Also recommended:
Sexual Art: Photographs that Test the Limits (1994)
Sexual Portraits: Photographs of Radical Sexuality (1990)
Sexual Magic: The S/M Photographs (1986)
Reviewed by Gary Meyer
(03/06/02)
Erotic photographer Michael A. Rosen's work has come full circle -- all the way from S/M, radical sex, and the most unconventional penetration imaginable (e.g.; an American flag flying from a penis) to the most vanilla cuddles. What hasn't changed in four volumes is the intimate delight he captures in black and white, the genuine warmth between his pansexual subjects and their sense of play and wonder, whether they're fisting, flogging, or fucking.
Despite its emphasis on more basic modes of sexual interaction, Lust & Romance is not a departure for Rosen, but rather a filling-in-the-blanks. Flogging and hugging aren't mutually exclusive; neither are fisting and kissing. Emotion and connection are what make sex work, regardless of costumes, tools, and techniques.
True to Rosen's style, Lust & Romance isn't pure vanilla. The range of activities and implements may be toned down, but there's plenty that will make you look twice, presented with Rosen's trademark wit and humor. Dicks pop up where you least expect them; there's a foursome, a spanking, a golden shower, some light bondage, self-fisting, and a battery-operated boyfriend.
Rosen's models aren't just models, but real-life partners. They look like everyday people; they could be your friends and neighbors. They aren't posed like models, either; few are looking at the camera. This is Rosen's most candid work. It makes you hold your breath to remain unnoticed and not disturb these glorious moments. Looking at these pictures begins as voyeurism and ends in self-recognition. No matter what your preference or style, you'll find yourself here, or wish you could.
His previous volumes take varying approaches to the wilder side of sex, but with no less enthusiasm, empathy, and craft. Sexual Magic, his first book, is deliberately rough, grainy, and blurry; the photographs taken, not given, fleeting peeks through the dungeon door. What's captured is unexpected: care, tenderness, and ecstasy in the midst of ritualized torture. Rosen's greatest subversion lies in humanizing acts that many consider depraved.
Sexual Portraits applies fine art technique to formal, full-figure studies of outlaw sexual identities: the balding middle-aged man with a heavy weight hanging from his scrotum, the young modern-primitive woman, her chest festooned with needles, the riding crop wielding matron in a leopard-print leotard, a pregnant Susie Bright attired in high-heeled boots and a hat, a ritually-posed Fakir Musafar sporting a hundred symmetrically arranged clothespins that make him into a winged, finned alien creature.
Sexual Art continues this elegant pictorial approach to the most transgressive combinations of hands, mouths, genitals, anuses, nipples, and various objects. His subjects' exuberant, delighted expressions push Rosen's message that the emotional content, the inner experience of all acts of love is the same, whatever the accessories and techniques employed. From his subjects' point of view, they aren't having weird sex; they're just having sex. They aren't out to shock or scandalize; this is simply how they like it. If we manage to control our societally-conditioned squick factors, we might find ourselves progressing from: "Wow, I didn't even know you could do that" to "Hey, let's give it a try."
Lube and latex predominate in Sexual Art. Several shots picture more wrists than hands. A cock wearing ten cockrings, labia spread by 22 clothespins, and a pair of vice grips dangling from a pair of breasts have been transformed into classic still-lifes. Amid all the Crisco, tattoos, and piercing jewelry, an unadorned pair of nudes recline on facing pages, a man and woman in similar postures, masturbating, their legs spread, their expressions transfixed with pleasure. The joke is that to many, these shots are just as taboo as the rest.
In a San Francisco Chronicle article,
Rosen explains how the photographs in Lust & Romance are sequentially arranged to mimic a typical sex act's progress, foreplay to penetration (in the most general sense of the term) to climax to afterglow. He owns up to his intent to arouse, maintaining that this does not prevent his work from being art. What characterizes porn, Rosen asserts, is neither subject matter nor intent, but artifice -- airbrushed flesh bent into stereotypical postures. Rosen's subjects follow no hackneyed scripts: "They're not acting out my scenarios," he says.
Lust & Romance is Rosen's most accessible work, the least likely to shock, except for those who believe that sex has no business anywhere except under the covers in the dark. Most remarkable about these photographs is not all the sucking and fucking and frigging and fisting, not the graceful composition, rich tones, and three-dimensional depth, but the joy in the faces, the fire in the eyes, the captured moments of sacred bliss.
Michael A. Rosen's career in sexual art has traveled beyond the outer limits and back again to teach us that drawing a line between natural and unnatural acts is the most unnatural act of all.
See the Michael A. Rosen gallery in Clean Sheets this week, along with an interview with him.
