Summary: After skimming thousands of images one pattern that’s emerging is it’s striking similarity to religious imagery.

I’ve glancingly mentioned it several times that I’ve undertaken a really massive review of porn and/or erotic photos on the web as digested and reposted and redigested and reposted on the Twitter-like photo-blogging service Tumblr.com. It’s been neither as enlightening, nor as distracting as I thought it might be, and obviously the format of any one site, and the obvious tendency of linkers-in-common of photos to have tastes in common as well. So I can’t call the experience at all random.

That said, after skimming something close to 10,000 images on more than 100 sites a couple of points (beyond a lot of probably obvious ones) stand out.

The biggest one, one that finally percolated through this morning, is…

Golly but a lot of porn looks like church.

Downturned heads, skyward gazes, repose, shadows, and over, and over, and over the “Jehovanist” facial expressions (interrupted most often by transgressive but equally gnostic ones), the drapes, the sheets, the clothes, the marble or tile or even the peeling wainscoting and dingy lamps speak as much of the attributes of worship as the attributes of sex. The models often appear as saints, or sinners penitent or unrepentant, taking each other’s offered bits as much as sacrament as satisfaction. Even the stylized agonies and ecstasies of bondage mimic the mortal endurance or higher-purposed stoicism of saints. And then there’s the highly church-like lack of non-ritual eye contact with either camera or each other. Ritual eye-contact, yes, as in “take this may it serve you well,” or “am I doing this right” or during moments of “do you take this person as your lawfully-wedded…?”

That’s totally subjective, of course. And perhaps porn isn’t intended to be consumed in such tremendous gouts, any more than words are meant to be repeated over and over and over till all that’s left is the sound in your mouth.

But if you were to ask me now what porn most reminds me of… what the spatial grammar seemed most like… I’d say church.

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Doh! Just to be clear, I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong, at all, with taking sex very seriously any more than it would be wrong to be serious about church. It’s just that…

I guess…

Thing is that it’s not so much about what happens in bed, any more than what happens in church.

It’s a correspondence in the ways both are presented in photography.

Because in church as in bed, and in bed as in church, more happens in reality than in our representations of it. Again that’s all fine — when we approach events as institutions we tend to filter strongly for that which meets our expectations.

What’s interesting (or maybe just revealing about me if I’m the only one) is that the representations seem so similar.

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What’s also interesting is how thoroughly refreshing it is when little bits of humanity poke through the solemnity. When it looks like people are having fun — not “behind the scenes” between-takes fun but old fashioned “I love this part” or “let’s remember that for next time” comfort/contact fun.

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And a final disclaimer: I’m not so much being critical as curious. When I take my own half-nekkid Thursday photos I’ll usually chuck ten or twenty pictures for every one I post, and I’m sure if I photographed other people instead I’d end up hewing to much the same doughty/dreamy seriousness I’ve been talking about. But now I’d be a lot more curious about what could be found in the spaces between poses.

Hmm. Something to think about.