Tasteful "Ambition"

Photographer Michael Grecco’s “Naked Ambition: an R-rated look at an X-rated industry”, is a coffeetable book that many would feel comfortable keeping on their coffee tables; there’s not a lot of nudity.

And the high-color photographs, snapped backstage at the past two AVN conventions and awards shows, often appear theatrical or like circus art, presenting the subjects in their porn finery as garish and safe, the way certain accountants dress like 70’s pimps at Halloween.

Read more after the gap.

For people who don’t know porn stars, who wonder about their habits and gathering places (but who don’t want to know an uncomfortable amount about those things), this is the book to own.

The title is misleading in that not too many people are naked, and “ambitious” is not the most apt adjective for a lot of folks in the book, but the “R-rated look at an X-rated industry” is spot on: there are no graphic tales of gaping or semen sharing, gangbangs gone bad, drug or sexual abuse, or suicide, but plenty of the paragraphs that accompany the photos of porn stars are chirpy pieces of personal philosophy.

“Naked Ambition” is a Porn Stars Are People Too book.

Grecco told his subjects to come as they were. “They came right off the floor (that way),” he said, his team having set up areas backstage at the awards and off the show floor during the convention.

So while Grecco did the lighting and framing and provided the backdrops, the porn stars look as they wanted you to see them and, when photographer and subject work in concert, the effect is a porn star who says something.

Thus, Penny Flame walks offstage with a torn award envelope, having flubbed a line during her presentation. Carmen Hart catches an air-grape, Kirsten Price laughs out loud, and Dana DeArmond gets shut out. We get the feeling we know something.

But many of the photos don’t say too much. The reader is left with the same sexy/innocuous poses (except clothed this time) as on porn boxcovers. In these cases the performers seem interchangeable. This is, of course, the difference between stars and everyone else.

As a document, “Naked Ambition” is valuable; two years can see a lot of changes, especially in a business with such a high turnover. Thus there’s Missy Monroe before her pregnancy, Tina Tyler in a brief punk period, and Jenna Jameson at the beginning of her current incarnation.

Grecco devotes an appropriate amount of space to fringe elements of the porn industry (like clowns, midgets, Michelle Aston, and the aged), but to his credit, everyone gets the same treatment. His coverage of the gay side has fewer notes in it, like fashion photography that is less porny than the rest of the book, but again, Grecco says he treated the subjects like a beat reporter.

My favorite photos are ones that appear to be in the middle ground between staged and casual. Among these are portraits of Lexington Steele, Cousin Stevie, Charlotte Stokely, and Yasmin Taylor.

“The idea of the book is that it is a journalistic document using the portrait photography and still photography,” Grecco said. And to a degree, letting the subjects do the work lets the photographer off the hook, but he’s still the guy framing the shot.

So if you come away from “Naked Ambition” with the feeling that there are only a few people in the porn business worthy of being called “stars”, you know they feel that way, too.

Previously: Mary Carey hosts a happening, Art on his sleeve
See also: Michael Grecco, Naked Ambition