Do you know about international calling cards? They’re amazing. Last night I spent about two hour gabbing with Ell in Australia and the whole conversation cost about $2.00. We talked about all sort of things, including my upcoming trip to AEE, which I’m both excited about and dreading.

I’m excited because we need to get the word out about Damon and Hunter and people I know who’ve been there before tell me the gay side of things is pretty low-key and we should actually be able to talk to make some connection. I’m also looking forward to it because there are some people who I’ve met and got to know online, but have never had the chance to meet in person.

I’m dreading it because the whole convention thing is not my bag. For better or worse I don’t go to other industry conventions, like NAB, which is practically a mandatory networking opportunity for people in the film and television industry. And one of the things I’m dreading about this convention in particular are the hordes of fratboy fans, with ballcaps, goatees, and digital cameras clamoring for souvenir gropes and snapshots. So not my scene.

As Ell and I talked about it, I started to have the idea that maybe I’d like to bring a camera and a few hundred feet of film. Film is almost never used in porn, not even for stills anymore, so our entire idea of what porn people look like is mediated by the harshness of digital video, and I started to think it would be nice to see how these men and women look when rendered through the decidedly gentler medium of a photo-chemical emulsion.

It’s not a new idea. A couple of years ago photographer Timothy Greenefield made a lovely book 30 Porn-Star Portraits featuring simply lit, frankly photographed portraits of greater and lessor names in the business, rendered as only a large format camera can render them.

But those were stills. When it comes to moving images, our idea of what porn people look like is formed almost entirely by what they look like though the lens of a Canon XL-1 or similar. Would it be interesting to see what they look like on film?

I think it might be, in fact I can practically see the finished piece in my head; a cavalcade of faces; some familiar and some not so much; some delighted, some suspicious but tolerant; all tumbling by. The music is light, perhaps even a little humorous, but always kind. A saucy one flashes a tit, and a defiant one flips the bird, and the faces tumble by, all rendered with that gentle, loving look that only film can give.

Would it be worth wandering around being a camera geek for a day? Would it be worth 400 or 800 feet of film? It might be, it just might be…

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2005 at 11:23 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.