Pornography (The Forest)

Eva Stenram

These eleven photographs are part of an ongoing series, 'Pornography (The Forest)', in which I seek out pornographic images on the internet that are set within or around forests. I have then digitally removed the bodies from these found images. By erasing the bodies, I have recovered another space previously obscured by the action, or rather constructed that other space by repeating other sections of the photograph. Rather than go for classically constructed images, I have chosen quite banal ones: neglected pockets that were not necessarily well-photographed in the first place, which are pixellated and distorted. The strangely-textured, low-quality look which results suggests police or forensic images, as though the spaces were the sites of horrific, if unnamed, events. The forest setting complements this ambiguity: at once a place of beauty and danger, of obscuring and clearing. Its quasi-repetition throughout the ten photographs both reproduces the banality of porn itself and elaborates a typography of spaces.