It's Just Love

[Arum]

It's Just Love: Finding beauty and empowerment in the porn industry

Written by Charlotte Harding

Photographer Sophie Ebrard series It's Just Love offers a beautifully intimate insight into the ubiquitous world of porn.

"Porn has been done before. Porn has been done a number of times," professes French-born, Amsterdam-based photographer Sophie Ebrard, the featured photographer for Firecracker this month.

"I was very conscious of that, but it was a subject of real interest for me. I was just so passionate, I just wanted to do it, and so that's how it started".

Ebrard's photographic exploration into the polarising, multi-billion dollar industry of porn took four years. She spent the time immersed in the background of high-end pornography sets, the results of which created her evocative new series It’s Just Love.

The resulting images are shocking, but not in a way you might expect. Each image is so soft and subtle, they almost appear mundane. Ebrard’s photographs exude a graceful stillness and Botticelli-esque quality; she strips away the brash, societal notions the word porn conjures by neutralising and humanising the gaze which usually befall these bodies.

Shooting with a medium-format camera, Ebrard has found a way of focusing on the beauty in the twists and folds of human flesh, and the quiet, intimate and humorous moments that naturally took place away from the performance of sex.

"I had access to an industry that not many had access to, and I wanted to make the most out of it, to really understand it, and I did," she says. "It was liberating, and the women I met were really empowered."

The series required Ebrard to step outside her own comfort zone. "A friend recommended to me that we go to a high-end swingers party, to find people to participate in the project," she says. "It was my first experience of this kind of thing, I hadn't seen anything like it, so I was scared and excited," she explains, unabashed.

"It was not as seedy as I thought it would be, in fact it was reassuring," she says. "It was the first time I saw someone having sex in front of me. It was not repulsive, but beautiful, I realised how beautiful the human body is, the shapes of the bodies as they entwined. At that moment, I really wanted to have my camera with me".

Mehr hier: http://www.bjp-online.com/2016/02/its-j ... -industry/