Photographer captures Naked Ambition

When it comes to writing about the sex-ertainment industry, it’s hard not to use puns. See, I’ve made three already. Maybe you can count along while you read this.

For today’s topic is photographer Michael Grecco’s new book, Naked Ambition: An R-rated Look at an X-rated Industry (Rock Out Books). Ain’t it nice that it’s out just in time for Xmas?

On Thursday, November 15, Grecco will be at Studio 415, 415 West Huron Street, Chicago, giving an oral presentation at 6:30 p.m. followed by a book signing.

My copy is somewhere on a delivery truck, but the press release says the book takes readers to the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, where Grecco went backstage to shoot not-what-you-might-think style portraits of porn people including Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick and the Hedgehog himself, Ron Jeremy. He also takes still life shots of porno props of all sorts.

Grecco said he first became intrigued by these goings-on in 2002 and wanted to document this Fellini-esque subculture. He returned in 2006, shooting close to 10,000 pictures, then returned in 2007 to finish up the project by taking portraits of couples involved in the business.

In one of those you couldn’t make this up scenarios, the porn convention happens at the same time, in the same place, as the Consumer Electronics Show. Insert your own geeks and freaks joke here. As Grecco put it, “It’s brilliant in a way.”

Grecco went into his work with preconceptions that he might meet a lot of broken people.

“What I learned was this is a segment of the regular population. The overriding thing for most of the women was that they do it for the adulation. And everyone involved enjoys sex.”

And some like Alexis Sky found her niche thanks to her naughty movie career. Sky is very tall and found it hard to get a date. With a Web site and movies, she found there is a niche market for her attributes.

The challenge for Grecco was to make this work serious fun but not necessarily salacious. A tough task given “most of the women wanted to take off their clothes and stick out their tongue,” which wasn’t what Grecco had in mind.

Grecco claimed that a plan to market his book was to have billboards with intriguing taglines and R-rated risqué images in Waco, Salt Lake and Peoria, but no one would sell his publisher space. He said the same was true in Chicago and Boston where they wanted prime space – as anyone who has driven down the interstate can tell you there are big billboards for adult bookstores and Hooters Girls to be seen.

Which reminds that porn is a big business. As Grecco pointed out, you can order it on your cable or satellite system now without anyone seeing you scurry out of a video store.

At the same time, the mere word “porn” polarizes people, Grecco said.

Of course, all you have to do is be online, like you are now, to know that porn – or whatever you like to call images of people having all sorts of sex – is readily available, and a whole bunch of it is free. In fact, there are gobs of homemade clips to be found on sites like Xtube. Regular people of all shapes, sizes and predilections (and no fear of losing their day jobs or having a neighbor or boss notice) can be seen in their birthday suits sharing bodily fluids, cavorting and contorting by themselves, with others or with unusual gift items. People can set up Web cameras and have virtual sex with complete strangers in far off places.

But Grecco doesn’t think this will do to the porn business what Craig’s List has done to newspapers.

“People still want to see glamorized situations,” he said.

We shall see. Some like it nice, some like it naughty. And some think, why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free.