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, 1977.
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 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.
‘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 photographically – transforming such beauty into something much more primal and profound’.
Aaron Schuman, British Journal of Photography.
Images © Michael Grieve
