Madison Ivy, Brazzer’s first female contract star © Rosie Marks

interview by Karly Quadros

Brazzers has a brand: funny, horny, stupid. Think girls stuck in washing machines. Think pizza boys, plumbers, and flight attendants. Brazzer's’ brand is not art and high fashion. But that doesn’t mean they’re so different either. This spring, the porn studio introduced Raw Talent, a fittingly super-sized coffee table book collaboration with photographer Rosie Marks, featuring behind the scenes images from the world of Brazzers. From fluid-filled adult entertainment conventions in Berlin to the unseen labor of the behind-the-scenes crew, Raw Talent tells the story of the tight-knit community behind one of America’s most ubiquitous and least understood industries.

KARLY QUADROS: What was the first day like? Had you ever been on a porn set before?

ROSIE MARKS: The first day on set there was a scene with loads of extras because it was a Pam [Anderson] and Tommy [Lee] themed sex scene, and there was a band playing. The concept was that she saw one of the band members and was disgusted by her current husband, so she ran off with one of the guys in the back of the bar. All these extras on set I thought were really interesting. Some of them are just consistently an extra, and then there are some extras that have appeared in hundreds of Brazzers films and some are aspiring to be in the industry. There's a lot of really interesting people, and I wanted to know how the hell they got there. There was one guy—it was his third week being in the industry. He had taken ayahuasca and it showed him a path to the industry. There's one performer in the book—we followed his trajectory from extra to ‘sextra’ to main performer.

I had never been on a porn set before, but I shot a lot of stuff in and around that world. I'd spent a couple of weeks in Japan shooting really intense BDSM stuff for a magazine commission last year, and I've also been making a documentary about this woman who is a sex worker for the last four years. I didn't really feel that much. When I'm in photographer mode, I feel like nothing really fazes me. Like I can sit in an operating room and watch a body be dissected and still not feel anything, whereas, if I had to watch someone be cut open without a camera would be a very different story.

QUADROS: How do you see your role as a photographer?

MARKS: In this project, I wanted to show it quite directly as it is. I was interested to show the process of porn, the moments that you basically wouldn't see if you're just watching it: the crew behind it, the moments in between takes. I guess I have a pretty voyeuristic, observational style of photography. So I was using that skill and trying to be as discreet as possible. But then there's also a lot of humor in this part of the industry. There’s always a completely bizarre scenario concocted as to how they end up having sex. They're always playing with different tropes, like there’s a vending machine or a washing machine and someone's stuck in it. All of these things are completely unrealistic and silly if you think about them in real life. I wanted to try and get that part of it across, that there is this very lighthearted side of the industry.

QUADROS: That’s very salient in the book because you will have people with that kind of slapstick energy or cartoonish faces then juxtaposed with something very mundane, like someone sitting on their phone or someone rolling cables.

MARKS: The way that a day on set goes, only maybe 45 minutes to an hour of it will be the actual sex. And then it’s choreographed. It's very much a performance. Then the rest of the day is just like being on any other type of shoot. There's a preconception of the porn industry being this sort of excessive or debaucherous thing, but that is absolutely not what my experience was. It was pretty sterile and more like a family vibe in the crew.

QUADROS: Something that’s very present in your work is the behind the scenes labor that goes into the obsessive cultivation of glamor. You show cables and lighting rigs. You show janitors and caterers and aestheticians. Did the process of shooting this book make you think differently about the labor that goes into adult films?

MARKS: Honestly no, because I knew what would be involved behind the scenes. But I wanted to show other people because that’s something I just take for granted. Anyone who works in any kind of media knows what goes into a production, be it porn or movies, media, advertising. That for me kind of destroys any kind of fantasy. There are a lot of people who might see this book who have absolutely no idea what goes into it, and maybe they don't want to know that. When speaking to one of the directors who used to be a performer—this woman called Lea Lexis—she said one day she brought a fan on the set. I think he had won a competition. He was a huge fan of her productions. And he ended up crying at the end of the day because he felt like his illusions of porn were shattered by watching it being made.

QUADROS: Do you think that seeing how the fantasy is created always destroys it for you?

MARKS: Yeah, I do.

QUADROS: A refrain I often hear from supporters who want to destigmatize porn is “sex work is work.” Is there room for work and desire and pleasure to intersect?

MARKS: For sure. Making this book, for me, was pleasure ultimately. Admittedly, a different type of pleasure than maybe the performers get. But it didn't feel like work to me. A lot of my job doesn't. It's the same thing for sex work—they should be able to experience both at the same time.

QUADROS: You were immersed in the world of porn far beyond just shoots though—you also went to things like conventions and award shows. What were those experiences like?

MARKS: We went to Venus, which is a porn convention in Berlin. That was the one place where I saw fans interacting with performers. It was one of the only things in this project that was public facing because the porn industry is a bubble, and it really feels that way in California, especially because it's like the parallel universe to Hollywood. That whole thing was a pretty insane few days, being in this convention center. Because it was in Germany, the rules are very different.

QUADROS: Are they more strict or more explicit?

MARKS: Anything goes. Live sex show on the stage any time of day. Every day I walked into the entrance—there were these pink stairs—and something crazy was going on there, like a man being whipped completely naked with like 100 people watching him cheering. One of the images [in the book] from that convention is this woman lifting up her skirt to a huge group of men taking photos. That was a spontaneous moment. You can walk around naked, if you want. There were fans who were being taken up onto the stage to be a part of the sex shows. At some point we were all watching this, like, Viking orgy. There was just a lot going on, just constant noise overload as well. Opposite the Brazzers booth, there were these guys singing karaoke, but it just seemed like they sang the same song that was just saying ‘sucky fucky’ on repeat for four days. That added a soundtrack to the whole weekend. But also that really showed to me the family side of this group of people. Everyone is in a place they don't know, together for this whole week. There was a kind of a sweetness amongst the absolute insanity of the whole convention.

Luna Star in her hotel room, after winning the Best International Star Award at the Venus Awards. Berlin, Germany © Rosie Marks.

Director Marvin Love with performers Tony Genuis and August Skye on the set of *A Nigerian Owambe*. Woodland Hills, CA. © Rosie Marks

*12 Horny Men: Cherie vs. Jury Duty*. Las Vegas, NV. © Rosie Marks

Ken Feels and Valentina prepare for their scene, in *Valentina in the Limelight*. Burbank, CA © Rosie Marks.

QUADROS: When I was doing research for this, I just kept thinking about how much porn there is, the magnitude of it, how many hours and how much gets logged a day, the hugeness of it, how ubiquitous it is. That seems to me to be one of the things that you capture really well.

MARKS: It's funny, though, because this book is such a tiny corner of the industry. It’s the upper echelon of porn. In terms of the performers, they’re at the top of their game. It’s like if I tried to make a book about actors, but I just looked at Nicole Kidman. But I think that you're right. There's so much out there, even the amount that this one company is making. One day when I was in the height of this in the summer, there would be up to three shoots a day in LA, and that was LA alone. There's an endless desire for this from all around the world. It's always evolving. As soon as something comes out or some kind of trend, they're responding to that. For example, like when fidget spinners were a thing, then fidget spinner porn became a big thing for them. Every TV show or movie, they've made a parody. They're mirroring the whole world in some way.

QUADROS: A lot of your work is centered around the act of desiring and the quest to be desirable. A lot of your work around plastic surgery, for instance, is about that. Nominally it’s about being sexy, but it’s also about something much bigger. What is your personal relationship to desire?

MARKS: I’ll contradict myself a little bit from what I said before in that I’m able to break down all of these things in the photo taking and make sense of it in that way. I still am a woman who’s affected by these things too. Sometimes people say things to me as if, because of the work I make, that somehow I’m completely unaffected by anything to do with glamor or beauty. I guess it’s just a way of making sense of it.

QUADROS: I’ve seen other people describe your work as voyeuristic. Does that resonate with you?

MARKS Yeah, I think it does. Sometimes I’ll just stand in a situation and feel deeply uncomfortable, like I want to be swallowed up into a wall. I’m normally not the sort of photographer that ends up deeply bonding with their subject. I’m not a completely antisocial person at all, but I try to keep a little distance to try and be more observational. I think subtly it affects the work in a positive way.

Kayler Gunner on the set of Sneaky Dive Bar Throwdown, a scene inspired by the infamous Pam & Tommy sex tape. Kayley
Gunner started her adult career as a cam girl while serving in the U.S. military. She did a character study of Pam in preparation for the shoot. “I do my own stunts.” Hollywood, CA. © Rosie Marks

Abella Danger and the fraternity brothers at the Pi Kappa Alpha house. Abella is a Philosophy and Classics double major at the University of Miami. Her thesis is on the morality of pornography. She is the Fraternity Sweetheart of Pi Kappa Alpha. Miami, FL. © Rosie Marks

QUADROS: Does it affect you?

MARKS: Yeah, I think it does. It makes me feel deeply uncomfortable a lot of the time. I don’t wish it to be any different at the end of the day. With this project, I was very much welcomed into this environment. People were aware of what I was doing. Sometimes I feel really massive in a room when actually it’s a complete illusion. No one gives a fuck. But I think my ideal a lot of the time is to not exist, to be a security camera.

QUADROS “Bad taste” is something that comes a lot in your work. I’m curious what you find so alluring about bad taste.

MARKS: I guess it’s just ingrained in me because fundamentally, at a certain level, I do have that taste. I’m also really interested in things that are just incredibly popular and mainstream in some way, which I think often is forgotten in art and photography. Obviously, this book is not going to be to the taste of everyone. But I found it really interesting being inside of a culture that, although many will deny it, is some of the most viewed stuff online. It’s viewed, feared, adored, whatever. There’s an insane amount of people watching this stuff, and it doesn’t really matter the reason for it. It’s fun for me to dissect the things that are being consumed every day.

QUADROS: Porn is so ubiquitous, but it’s still not really normalized. You see porn aesthetics and tropes in pop culture and definitely in social media, but porn itself still feels really charged. There’s a lot of power to shock. How do you move beyond shock value with your camera? Do you ever lean into it?

MARKS: A lot of that comes in the edit process. I did take more pictures in this project that are probably more direct in their shock value. Moving beyond it is when there’s human emotion involved and there’s a sensitivity behind whatever the shock value thing is. As soon as you go on a porn set, you realize it isn’t that shocking. There’s a sterility around it based on safety measures, the way things are recorded nowadays. I was a little surprised by how sterile it was. The sets feel very un-sexual. They’re like empty, weird houses. A lot of it is filmed at the Brazzers studio, which is constantly changing. It’s just one of those sets where one day it’s a bedroom, the next day it’s a kitchen, and then it’s a locker room. They often all look and feel the same. The aesthetics probably do respond to the now. If you look at TikTok, all of that aesthetic is reflected back into the porn that’s being made.

QUADROS: Was there anything that surprised you on set?

MARKS I wasn’t expecting it to be as funny as it was. The scripts, they’re often so far-fetched and completely silly. One of my favorites was the final shoot that I went on, which was a courtroom orgy. The idea was that this lady was being sentenced to 24 hours in jail for stealing a pineapple. And then she freaked out to the judge because she’s never gone 24 hours without cock. That was the line. And then she had sex with the whole jury, just in front of the judge and the audience in the courtroom. They definitely didn’t have to put that much effort into that story and all the details of stealing a pineapple (because if you want to taste good you eat pineapple.) It’s just things like that. I don’t know how many people even watch any of this stuff or they just skip to the bit they want to see. But there’s a lot of work that goes into these moments before the sex happens.

interview by Karly Quadros

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