Gape: 2010

This series deals with internet pornography in its many guises and attempts to flag up some psychological and moral issues associated with this genre. I started this project as a result of discussions with some graduates I was teaching regarding art and the internet some years ago, the project has developed from that point.

My manipulations when they occur are my attempt to grotesque the grotesque, many of the images thus take on a threatening surreal nightmarish aura when I have finished with them and some are plain funny.

As a child I had regular nightmares and febrile hallucinations due to poor health and although none of these nightmares were sexual these manipulations appear to spring subconciously from those grim nocturnal experiences.

The images I make from these internet downloads have echoes in Bacon, Polanski, Belmer, Pop Art and Advertising.

I first encountered pornography at the age of 17 and it had a very powerful effect on me. I found it sexually stimulating but at the same time threatening and scary. My upbringing was a sexually repressed one. I was often sent out of the room by my parents if anything salacious came on the TV and the subject of sex was always avoided scrupulously in my home, because of this and coupled with my teenage sexual awakening obviously sex became a thing I was tremendously curious about. The fact that I found it frightening stemmed from feeling deep down that there was something fundamentally wrong about pornography and maybe even sex, the fact that sex was a subject which was avoided at all costs in our home these suspicions were amplified.
Today pornography is common currency in children much younger than I was when I was first exposed. Children of ten and eleven in my sons school are passing round porn clips in the playground on their mobile phones and sending texts of same on a regular basis. Come-ons between boys and girls are much more explicit and to the point.
Some children whose parents are obviously too wrapped up in their own lives to care allow their children un-monitored internet access at home. It seems as long as their kids stay quiet and do not cause them trouble they don't seem to care.
How these children will form adult relationships and what their attitudes will be to sexual relations is frightening to say the least.
It seems to me that a society that turns a blind eye to childrens internet use and puts an eight year old girl in a thong (which is not uncommon on the european continent), is heading fast for moral bankruptcy.

This series also looks at a different type of pornography I call 'shock porn' (or today in a Haiti article 'disaster porn' 'The photojournalistic carnivores flood this battered country in search of their prize-winning trophy pics.') where images of human suffering, death and deviant behaviour are made available for human tittilation.

In Victorian Britain well to do and supposedly well educated people paid to enter morgues and insane asylums to look at decaying corpses and lunatics as 'shock' entertainment. Today we have the internet, and what we can now witness from the comfort of our own homes is profoundly more disturbing and deviant than anything our Victorian predecessors witnessed.
I have tried not to flinch from much of the imagery I discovered, but....the horror of some imagery I came across on the web disturbed and shocked me so much I simply did not have the stomach to consume it or attempt to represent it artistically. Some images I found to be so powerful that I have declined to 'interfere' with them at all and simply present them very close to how they looked when discovered on my screen.
Some sites with snuff and/or child imagery are illegal, profoundly obnoxious and extremely deviant. I did not 'dig' in these areas for fear of prosecution and for reasons of personal disgust and taste, though regrettably I have inadvertently had a tiny bit of exposure too it and lost some sleep as a result.

Exhibition Prints

All of the images are edited up to pixel size (ie pixels are not disguised) for gallery / portfolio showing as large prints probably on heavy paper. Prints are 3 or 4 ft square or rectangular and look pleasingly tactile like blended oil paint or watercolour close up, so in the midst of perversity tactile beauty emerges.

I am currently looking for a venue to exhibit this work.

www.johntaylorphotography.com