Gallery 9 - Portraits From Pornography

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- Man Raising Woman's Skirt
- Woman with Dildo
- Woman and Man Drinking
- Man and Woman Copulating
- Woman and Man lying on a Couch
- Two Women
- Woman with Two Men
- Man and Woman Watching

Portraits from Pornography

I discovered the Rotenberg collection of early pornography while researching images for another series, the peeping boxes. I became fascinated with the unknown stories behind these old Victorian and Edwardian black and white photographs. I felt a connection with these dispossessed or marginalised people from our grandparents' and great-grandparents' time.

The portrait is traditionally a record and celebration of the famous or noteworthy in our society. The paintings then are a subversion of the proper use of portraiture. I am using the form to imagine and create secret lives for these lost people. This mixing of fact and fiction is the same technique used in contemporary literature to expand our emotional understanding of a subject.