I used to be surprised by how uncluttered homes in Los Angeles were by comparison with the places I’d grown up. Rooms were spare with few pictures on the wall, able to be left at a moment’s notice. I think this is because most of L.A.’s transient population thinks that their current situation is temporary. And this bleeds into relationships.
“It’s difficult to say if it’s about the trappings of the industries that make up entertainment, porn, pop music, pro sports, etc. – or if it’s more about the people that are drawn to them,” said Paulie, one half of the husband/wife photography team Paulie and Pauline.
“Off the Set,” Paulie and Pauline’s 120-page coffeetable book featuring ten couples of whom at least one partner is in porn, seeks to show that porn performers are just like anyone else in their relationships, or even more intently devoted to those relationships because of the odds against them.
Among those odds: jealousy, wanderlust, shame, the need to get away, the end of the honeymoon. But of the ten couples photographed over the course of several years, six of them are still together. That’s better than the national average.
Among my favorite pictures are Nicki and Josh Hunter hiking, Kylie Ireland and Eli Cross in a Vegas hotel room, Lorelei Lee at home in San Francisco, and Buck and Elayne Angel. These are neither glamour shots nor completely unstaged, as the subjects are used to being photographed and are always aware of the camera, but we see how these performers, unlike people not used to photographers, aren’t self-conscious to distraction.
“Off the Set” does not have a theme other than “porn couples,” so the photos and bits of text are unpredictable. Semore Butts and Mari Possa share some (heavily ass-centric) love letters, and Lorelei Lee, now enrolled in an MFA program at New York University, submits a subtly heartbreaking story about her breakup with the man in the pictures.
“I’m glad that I wrote it,” Lee told me, “and I was actually surprised when I re-read it, to find that I could still get behind it – I was glad to notice that it still feels honest to me, despite having been written both during and just preceding a break-up, when I was still feeling pretty hurt and confused about the whole thing, and could probably have gotten way more maudlin. I also think the essay actually makes clear to me many of the reasons that relationship had to end – even if I didn’t realize these reasons as I wrote it.”
Other than the uniform fantasticness of the breasts involved, these pictures could be of any ten couples. That is why “Off the Set” is as much a snapshot of the latter half of the last decade as it is of porn stars. There is a sense of freedom and mobility and living in the moment, as if the couples are aware those moments might end.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Amy Fisher and Lou Bellera – How to quit worrying and love your celebrity sex tape; At home with April Flores and Carlos Batts; The Voluptuous fet of Ed Fox; Nina Hartley And Ernest Greene: O (the power of submission) The Places They Go; “Sinner Takes All” – Tera Patrick is clever, classy, and coy
See also: See also: Paulie and Pauline, Order “Off the Set: Porn Stars and Their Partners
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