No Love Lost, British sex Industry, 2008
No Love Lost is a visual itinerary documenting people who use their sexuality as a commodity. The seemingly spiritually vacant environments of prostitution, pornography and stripping, invoke a sense of unfulfilled and dislocated lives. People appear stuck in one place; and that is the loneliness of their own psyches. However, in a world of performance and illusion, we encounter moments of intimacy in carefully controlled places, with rules of engagement that disallow any form of intimacy.
Sex is still surrounded by taboos, but everywhere we transgress against them in our desperation to overcome an agonising sense of separation from other people. Without taboos we lose desire. Paradoxically, in overcoming taboos the modern sex industry appears to sanitise desire.
No Love Lost is not a statistical documentation of the British ‘adult’ industry. It does not attempt to answer questions or strive to reach conclusions. The work has no moral imperative and yet it is about morals.
These images represent a fragment of a larger body of work, grabbed from a world that is perceived as crude and vulgar. Although society bestows shame on sex work the people who I have encountered appear to have a refreshing honesty concerning their profession and have overcome the constraints of sexual and moral hypocrisy.
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