Stripped: Laura Carton

Originally written by Terin Talarico for Illiterate Media

Already bored with internet porn by the late 90’s, New York-based Laura Carton found herself asking, “Why?” and from that frame of mind arose her photographic series, Stripped.  Using Photoshop to erase the human figures from a variety of pornographic film stills, Carton creates banal, utopian, and slightly off-kilter scenes.  Carton explains, “Shorn of buffed, blow-dried actors, they lose their practical function and become open-ended. Your imagination does the rest” (PDN, July 2009). Doors ajar, rumpled bedsheets, props defying gravity, and the strangely decorated interiors imply missing human action.

Early in the decade, Stripped’s images were exhibited as oversized C-prints, titled by the XXX website’s URL. This clever presentation forces the viewer to realize, in shock, that these edited scenes are pornographic after all.  Removal of the figure brings a focus to the particular objects and decor within the frame. The spaces and props, a construction by the film makers, vary in lifestyle and implied wealth; this asks Carton’s viewers to question fantasy and utopian ideals for each class and pornographic audience.  What remains in Carton’s modified film stills are quiet fictional narratives about fantasy, sex, class, commodity, and (de)construction.

Nazraeli Press has recently picked up Stripped for a fine-art photobook, published in first edition of 500. Nazraeli’s catologue  boasts books by photography greats, old and new, including: Stephen Shore, Lee Freidlander, Irving Penn, Robert Adams, Alec Soth, Martin Parr, and Todd Hido.