Empty Porn Sets

No thrusting flesh-bits, no preened pubes and no orgasmic yelps. It’s not immediately obvious that Jo Broughton’s photographs are of porn sets. But look closer and the kitschy sound stages are engorged with clues — the discarded heels, abandoned and very small frilly clothes and, of course, the dildos and tubs of sex grease.

We all know porn is fake, but Broughton’s series Empty Porn Sets, shot on and off over a period of ten years, really pulls back the curtain. This photographs takes the tit out of titillation, but it doesn’t mean they’re not a tease. Broughton wants her audience to work toward the facts; to pay close attention and find the clues. She deliberately photographed just after the set had been vacated.

“The evidence of human contact had to be there,” says Broughton. “I wanted [the photographs] not to be contrived and to have a documentary element.”

Porn is an audio and (mostly) visual experience. It is a craft that mimics the real world and hams up sexual tropes. Porn does what the best art, photography and advertising does — it sells people on a simulation of reality. And porn makes money. Broughton offers an insider’s (and almost anthropological) view of a lucrative based entirely on spectacle. Empty Porn Sets provides the tantalizing peek into a taboo industry for a casual audience but in the way it plays with layers of seeing and embraces it’s meta view, there’s appeal for the critics too. Above and beyond all of that, these are simply thoughtfully gathered and well-crafted compositions.

If you thought the pictures were crazy enough, wait until you hear how Broughton came to make them. She must surely be the only fine art photographer who not only learned her craft on porn sets, but also lived on the studio sets.

Jo Broughton left home at an early age. She took herself to the local Thurrock College in Essex, where she grew up, to study fine art. While there, she applied for work experience through the college as a photographer’s assistant.

Steve needed an assistant. Broughton went to the studio.

“I was greeted by a man who was wearing shorts. with no top,” she recalls. “He had blonde hair in a longish bob, wore black, thick-rimmed glasses, and with skin so tanned he looked like he worked outside. He kisses me on both cheeks and says ‘Hello, darling’ with a thick Yorkshire accent. I smiled nervously and said hello, but I must have looked agape as I’d never been kissed on both cheeks before, let alone from a man I’d never met.”

Broughton and Steve would not be strangers for long. In the ensuing years, he was to become her mentor and de facto guardian. Between studies and different jobs, Broughton lived and worked at Steve’s studio on and off for ten years.

“I loved living there or just visiting the space. It felt safe, and I felt accepted. The sunlight would stream through the windows and the space would have echoes of all the chaos that happened throughout the day,” says Broughton.

What seemed odd at first became normal. Despite the edgy nature of the videos and stills made in the studio, it was a place she could hone her image-making skills. She used those skills to secure a job as assistant to the picture editor of the Life supplement of the The Observer newspaper. But the porn sets were never far away.

“I would go home to the studio at night as the models were leaving, sit with Steve, and watch telly. I would generally sleep on that day’s set, which was always a little strange waking up on.”

Working with Steve was a boon to her application to study at the Royal College of Art, too. On the application for her Masters, Broughton bent the truth and said she’d been working for a portrait photographer. Steve supplied the letter of reference.

Although she’d stopped assisting Steve, and stopped the odd studio work she did while on work experience—running slide film up to the lab, painting sets, ironing bed linen, cleaning and mopping—when she began studying at the RCA, he needed a cleaner so she took the job to help pay the bills as, she says, “I was skint!” (broke). Always resourceful, Broughton also waitressed and worked occasional gigs as an editorial photographer. All the while, she was adding to her series Empty Porn Sets, picture by picture.

There’s some strange comfort, for this writer at least, to be found in the fact that Broughton has scaled the mountain to hallowed artist’s ground by finding her own way and being, now, honest about how she got there. Many great photographers advise to photograph what is before you: to see what’s right under your nose and find what can be intriguing in the overlooked. Empty Porn Sets is a case in point.

Broughton couldn’t have known then what her work experience application would lead to but she certainly doesn’t forget her first day.

“Down the bottom of the studio there was a nurse’s room set — and out of a little door with a silver star stuck to the window, Jo Guest walks into the studio, wearing full-on lacy underwear with suspenders,” recalls Broughton. “On top of her head was plonked a nurse’s hat.”

As the scene unfolded and Guest, who Broughton had only seen on the tabloids’ Page-3s before, tottered around wearing next to nothing, Steve turned to Broughton and asked, ‘Have you ever seen a fanny upfront?’

‘No,’ squeaked Broughton.

‘Today’s your lucky day,’ harped Steve.

Whatever expectations Broughton had were turned on their head.

“I tried to pretend this was all in my stride,” confesses Broughton.

Now if you’re thinking that all this sounds seedy, you be right. But only partially. The late 1990s and early 2000s are essentially a bygone era of porn production that was mild as compared to today’s hardcore. The Internet hadn’t yet made the whole shebang a digital free-for-all.

“These were the days when the law was strict: no penetration, soft penis, no tongues touching. Everything had to be suggested,” explains Broughton.

Though seeing camera-prepped wobbly bits became a daily drudgery, Broughton still maintained a critical awareness of what was going on. She’s not lost sight of the fact that much of porn objectifies — sometimes violently so — women.

Her experience, however, has allowed her only to see the many opinions toward the industry. Often, she had to deal directly with people who took a vitriolic dislike to the work inside Steve’s studio.

“When I first worked for Steve, people would call the studio landline and scream obscenities on the phone,” says Broughton.

Despite the showy appeal of Empty Porn Sets, Broughton barely told anyone where she lived and worked during the years she made the series. For example, she never told her colleagues at the newspaper that she had a second job cleaning porn sets.

“I was warned by everyone at studio to be careful who I told where I worked, and a few times I witnessed others connected to pornography go through the backlash of people’s opinions and reactions,” says Broughton.

Unfortunately, ‘Don’t hate the player, hate the game’ is not a mantra that lands for some. Attacks on Broughton are misplaced; she didn’t create the industry and, besides, many opinions on porn are shaped either by misinformation or shamed emotions. Broughton gives credit to photographers like David LaChapelle for dealing with the porn industry in his series Life and Death of a Porn Diva (2000), as well as Blur for casting Jo Guest in the Country House video. Add Larry Sultan and Jason Salavon to that list too.

“If it was found out in the photographic industry that you worked in pornography, that’s all you’d be able to do,” says Broughton. “It was like you were the devil itself.”

Fortunately, for us, Broughton wasn’t chased to the margins or made to feel less capable. She found her own path and now the world has her intelligent, reasoned images with which to consider the complexities and contradictions of this veiled but ever-present sex industry.

All photographs © Jo Broughton