Twenty-Eight Figure Studies

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."