Rosie Marks

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.

The Venus Berlin © Rosie Marks

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

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.

American Ecstasy

Take me to your room and fuck me.

There is something indefinable in your vocabulary;

something left; to be desired.

Philip Dick
The Schizos' Ball

“Turning everything into reality.”

Jimmy Cliff

text by Jean Baudrillard

The trompe l'oeil removes a dimension from real space, and this accounts for its seduction. Pornography by contrast adds a dimension to the space of sex, it makes the latter more real than the real—and this accounts for its absence of seduction.

There is no need to search for the phantasies that haunt pornography (fetishisms, perversions, primal scenes, etc.,), for they are barred by an excess of "reality." Perhaps pornography is only an allegory, that is to say, a forcing of signs, a baroque enterprise of over-signification touching on the "grotesque" (literally, "grotesque" garden art added to a rocky nature as pornography adds the vividness; of anatomical detail).

The obscenity itself burns and consumes its object. One sees from up close what one has never seen before; to one's good fortune, one has never seen one's genitals function from so close, nor for that matter, from so general a perspective. It is all too true, too near to be true. And it is this that is fascinating, this excess of reality, this hyperreality of things. The only phantasy in pornography, if there is one, is thus not a phantasy of sex, but of the real, and its absorption into something other than the real, the hyperreal. Pornographic voyeurism is not a sexual voyeurism, but a voyeurism of representation and its perdition, a dizziness born of the loss of the scene and the irruption of the obscene.

Consequent to the anatomical zoom, the dimension of the real is abolished, the distance implied by the gaze gives way to an instantaneous, exacerbated representation, that of sex in its pure state, stripped not just of all seduction, but of its image's very potentiality. Sex so close that it merges with its own representation: the end of perspectival space, and therefore, that of the imaginary and of phantasy—end of the scene, end of an illusion.

Obscenity, however, is not pornography. Traditional obscenity still contains an element of transgression, provocation, or perversion. It plays on repression, with phantasies of violence. With sexual liberation this obscenity disappears: Marcuse's "repressive desublimation" goes this route (and even if it has not passed into general mores, the mythical triumph of release today, like that of repression yesterday, is total). The new obscenity, like the new philosophy (la nouvelle philosophy) arises on the burying grounds of the old, and has another meaning. It does not play with violent sex, sex with real stakes, but with sex neutralized by tolerance. Sex here is outrageously "rendered," but it is the rendering of something that has been removed. Pornography is its artificial synthesis, its ceremony but not its celebration. Something neo or retro, like those green spaces that substitute their chlorophyl effects for a defunct nature, and for this reason, partake of the same obscenity as pornography.

Modern unreality no longer implies the imaginary, it engages more reference, more truth, more exactitude—it consists in having everything pass into the absolute evidence of the real. As in hyperrealist paintings (the paintings of the "magic realists") where one can discern the grain of the face's skin, an unwonted microscopics that lacks even the charm of the uncanny. Hyperrealism is not surrealism, it is a vision that hunts down seduction by means of visibility. One "gives you more." This is already true of colour in film or television. One gives you so much color, lustre, sex, all in high fidelity; and with all the accents (that's life!)—that you have nothing to add, that is to say, nothing to give in exchange. Absolute repression: by giving you a little too much one takes away everything. Beware of what has been so well "rendered," when it is being returned to you without you ever having given it!

A bewildering, claustrophobic and obscene image, that of Japanese quadrophonics: an ideally conditioned room, fantastic technique, music in four dimensions, not just the three of the environing space, but a fourth, visceral dimension of internal space. The technical delirium of the perfect restitution of music (Bach, Monteverdi, Mozart!) that has never existed, that no one has ever heard, and that was not meant to be heard like this. Moreover, one does not "hear" it, for the distance that allows one to hear music, at a concert or somewhere else, is abolished. Instead it permeates one from all sides; there is no longer any musical space; it is the simulation of a total environment that dispossesses one of even the minimal analytic perception constitutive of music's charm. The Japanese have simple-mindedly, and in complete good faith, confused the real with the greatest number of dimensions possible. If they could construct hexaphonics, they would do it. Now, it is by this fourth dimension. which they have added to music, that they castrate you of all musical pleasure. Something else fascinates (but no longer seduces) you: technical perfection, "high fidelity," which is just as obsessive and puritanical as the other, conjugal fidelity. This time, however, one no longer even knows what object it is faithful to, for no one knows where the real begins or ends, nor understands, therefore, the fever of perfectibility that persists in the real's reproduction.

Technique in this sense digs its own grave. For at the same time that it perfects the means of synthesis, it deepens the criteria of analysis and definition to such an extent that total faithfulness, exhaustiveness as regards the real becomes forever impossible. The real becomes a vertiginous phantasy of exactitude lost in the infinitismal.

In comparison with, for example, the trompe-l’oeil, which saves on one dimension, "normal" three-dimensional space is already debased and impoverished by virtue of an excess of means (all that is real, or wants to be real, constitutes a debasement of this type). Quadrophonics, hyperstereo, or hifi constitute a conclusive debasement.

Pornography is the quadrophonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude—a close-up of the invisible structures of the cell—to this notion of an inexorable truth that can no longer be measured with reference to the play of appearances, and that can only be revealed by a sophisticated technical apparatus. End of the secret.

What else does pornography do, in its sham vision, than reveal the inexorable, microscopic truth of sex? It is directly descended from a metaphysics that supposes the phantasy of a hidden truth and its revelation, the phantasy of "repressed" energy and its production—on the obscene scene of the real. Thus the impasse of enlightened thought when asked, should one censure pornography and choose a well-tempered repression? There can be no definitive response in the affirmative, for pornography has reason on its side; it is part of the devastation of the real, of the insane illusion of the real and its objective "liberation." One cannot liberate the productive forces without wanting to "liberate" sex in its brute function; they are both equally obscene. The realist corruption of sex, the productivist corruption of labor—same symptoms, same combat.

The equivalent of the conveyor belt here, is the Japanese vaginal cyclorama—it outdoes any strip-tease. Prostitutes, their thighs open, sitting on the edge of a platform, Japanese workers in their shirt-sleeves (it is a popular spectacle), permitted to shove their noses up to their eyeballs within the woman's vagina in order to see, to see better—but what? They clamber over each other in order to gain access, and all the while the prostitutes speak to them gently, or rebuke them sharply for the sake of form. The rest of the spectacle, the flagellations, the reciprocal masturbation and traditional strip-tease, pales before this moment of absolute obscenity, this moment of visual voracity that goes far beyond sexual possession. A sublime pornography: if they could do it, these guys would be swallowed up whole within the prostitute. An exaltation with death? Perhaps, but at the same time they are comparing and commenting on the respective vaginas in mortal seriousness, without ever smiling or breaking out in laughter, and without ever trying to touch—except when playing by the rules. No lewdness, but an extremely serious, infantile act borne of an undivided fascination with the mirror of the female organ, like Narcissus' fascination with his own image. Beyond the conventional idealism of the strip-tease (perhaps there might even be some seduction here), pornography at its most sublime reverses itself into a purified obscenity, an obscenity that is purer, deeper, more visceral. But why stop with nudity, or the genitalia? If the obscene is a matter of representation and not of sex, it must explore the very interior of the body and the viscera. Who knows what profound pleasure is to be found in the visual dismemberment of mucous membranes and smooth muscles? Our pornography still retains a restricted definition. Obscenity has an unlimited future.

But take heed, it is not a matter of the deepening of a drive; what is involved is an orgy of realism, an orgy of production. A rage (perhaps also a drive, but one that substitutes itself for all the others) to summon everything before the jurisdiction of signs. Let everything be rendered in the light of the sign, in the light of a visible energy. Let all speech be liberated and proclaim desire. We are reveling in this liberalization, which, in fact, simply marks the growing; progress of obscenity. All that is hidden and still enjoys a forbidden status, will be unearthed, rendered to speech and made to bow before the facts. The real is growing ever larger, some day the entire universe will be real, and when the real is universal, there will be death.