How to represent sex as a place of ecstasy rather than pornography? How to transcend the
unavoidable physicality of the sexual act sometimes tender sometimes violent to reach what
Diana Michener calls the place of communion ... the unknown the cosmic? Michener initially
considered depicting live models for this book yet finally decided to photograph stills from
pornographic films transforming the hyperreality of the sex industry its tarnished colored
gloss into something more ambiguous timeless and expressive. The figurative forms of sex are
often (just) recognizable in Michener's black-and-white pictures: a kiss breasts entangled
limbs but just as often they are not. Bodies are simplified and blurred seeping into
abstraction and darkness hinting at yet never embracing explicitness. In images both graphic
and impressionistic Michener's self-declared goal steadfastly remains to transform into the
visual what is emotional and mental.
