Porn. From vintage XXX magazines, to many of today’s most-visited websites, to the AI-enabled media of the future, it’s been part of people’s lives since records began, and will probably stay that way until humanity wipes itself out or gets replaced by asexual automata. Is that a good thing, or is it a bad thing? Well, we can’t really decide, despite decades upon decades of debate. In the meantime, though, we do know that paying attention to porn can help us get to the heart of some of the innermost parts of the human condition, from addiction, to intimacy, to fetishes and IRL abstinence.

Over the years, Dazed has explored many of these topics – and much more – through the lens of porn, publishing illicit photo projects from the likes of Bruce LaBruce, Dian Hanson AKA the “Queen of Smut”, and Sophie Ebrard, whose 2015 series It’s Just Love explored touching in-between moments on porn sets. Elsewhere, there’s photojournalist Tabitha Soren’s investigation of our digital consumption habits, via two of America’s favourite activities – cat videos and online porn – plus smutty photo books poking fun at gay porn, voyeuristic snapshots of sex cinemas in Athens, and visual dispatches from Tokyo’s love hotels. 

Want to take a deep dive into this history... or are you just here to browse? Either way, you can find all of the above photo projects and more in the galleries below.

IT’S JUST LOVE, SOPHIE EBRARD

A naked porn performer takes time out to iron his shirt in-between takes. Another pauses, mid sex-act, to learn her lines. On the periphery: dildos, camera equipment, and tissues (lots and lots of tissues). In It’s Just Love, Sophie Ebrard captures rare glimpses of a porn set when the cameras aren’t rolling, before footage is edited and marketed to the horny masses. As Ebrard herself told Dazed in 2015: “With porn shoots you always see tits, fanny... you never see anything like this.”

SURFACE TENSION, TABITHA SOREN

“Who would have ever thought that these are the two activities that Americans engage with online more than anything else? I’m certainly not judging it.” Here, artist and journalist Tabitha Soren is talking about cat videos and porn, two forms of media synonymous with the internet since its early days. In her photo series Surface Tension these seemingly-disparate subject matters are placed side-by-side on film prints marked by greasy smudges and fingerprints, as if seen through a grubby phone screen. The result, she says: “is a map of what we’ve been doing, where we’ve been, and how often we use the machines – but I am also pushing together the technology and the messiness of life to remind people that our humanity is beautiful.”

MEMORY TURNED INTO FLESH, EKATERINA BAZHENOVA-YAMASAKI

Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki had been exploring the female body, desire, and the male gaze in her practice as a photographer for more than a decade when she headed to Japan in 2018. There, in Tokyo, it all came to a head in images of the city’s love hotels and porn sets, offering a female perspective on the erotic in Japanese culture (where femininity is often strictly codified, and sexuality is shrouded in myths). “I wanted to keep it more raw, private, more real, and less poetic,” says Bazhenova-Yamasaki, of the resulting zine, Memory Turned Into Flesh. “I explored the connection between flesh and nudity, between nudity and the presentation of seduction, and between seduction and femininity, and the way it’s executed and performed.”

THE VISITOR, BRUCE LABRUCE

It will surprise nobody to find Bruce LaBruce on this list – across the course of his career, the Canadian filmmaker has repeatedly explored the intersection of taboo pornography and arthouse cinema. Recently, this has included a pornified take on Theorem, the 1968 film by Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, which falls somewhere between an art installation, performance, and work of cinema. Focusing on a Black refugee who arrives on a dinghy up the Thames, LaBruce’s The Visitor also examines the collision of sexual debauchery with the ugly realities of racism and xenophobia.

SMUT, VOLUME II: VOYEURISM, EZEKIEL

Taking aim at the often-arbitrary siloing of content on gay porn sites – where you might find videos labelled ‘outdoor’, ‘solo’, or ‘age gap’, among other suggestive categories – Ezekiel’s 2023 photo book SMUT, Volume II: Voyeurism draws out their inherent comedy, poking fun at the whole process of porn consumption. 

“I wanted to emphasise the ludicrousness of these mainstream categories and how they’ve essentially stripped voyeuristic behaviours of their true essence,” they told Dazed when the book was published. “Authentic voyeurism hinges on the subject being unaware of being observed or recorded, but in the gay pornography that attempts to depict this, everyone is an actor and complicit in the scenario.” Similarly, Ezekiel’s images revolve around patently artificial scenarios, like ‘The Checkup’, ‘The Cruiser’, or ‘The Spanking’, to deconstruct and reimagine gay porn archetypes.

CENTREFOLD, CARLY RIES

Porn is far from a new construction, and New York-based photographer Carly Ries spells this out in a series of NSFW images – mixing her own photographs and still lifes with pages from the vintage X-rated magazines of the late 70s and 80s – in her photo book Centrefold. Typically involving two or more women, the latter “were clearly made by men for men” Ries points out, but searched for moments where the interactions between performers may have evaded the male gaze. “I tried to find the places that looked like an actual connection between the two people,” the photographer explains, “not because I thought it was necessarily sexual, but because they were colleagues.”

A FAGGOT’S DESTINY, HELIAS DOULIS

Athens’ illicit gay porn booths are endangered spaces in the 2020s, long predating the internet (and, of course, the ubiquity of internet porn). However, they still offer a private hideaway for sexual encounters, amid the semi-public domain of the city street, for those that know where to look. “Their existence thrilled those who wanted to experience the freedom of being themselves among strangers,” says photographer Helias Doulis, who captured the booths and their occupants – a group of willing strangers, who played out their fantasies by torchlight – in his pre-pandemic photo project A Faggot’s Destiny. 

“I am proud to have photographed men who are proud to be themselves,” he told Dazed, of the project. “I am thankful to those who did not fear to pose. Our love is timeless and so are the gay porn booths.”

LESBIANS FOR MEN, DIAN HANSON

Pulled together by Dian Hanson, Taschen’s editor of sexy books and “Queen of Smut”, the 2017 book Lesbians for Men shone a new light on a long-documented phenomenon: women acting as lesbians, often for the pleasure of a masculine, heteronormative viewership. Needless to say, the images are explicit, but the approach is slightly more anthropological, busting myths and setting misunderstandings straight from across the course of history, from as early as 1890 through to the late 2010s. This takes us from porn, where faux-lesbian actors are often just in it for the paycheque, to society’s fixation (and relatively free stance) on girl-on-girl experimentation.

“Women aren’t disgusted by the idea of having sex with each other in the same way men claim that they are,” says Hanson, in an interview with Dazed. “Society doesn’t condemn female experimentation, but men often identify gay sex as unfeminine and undesirable. We still haven’t reached the point where the average straight guy can just laugh it off.”