EROS / EROTICON The Erotic Eye: Is It Art? Is It Porn? Vol. I: P as in Pornstar, (Visual) Poetics and Photographer / Pornographer

Editor’s Note:  Beauty may lie in the eye of the beholder, but eroticism? That’s a private screening in the mind’s own velvet-draped cinema — a place I like to call the Eroticon Zone. In this private theatre, we each carry a secret visual compass that decodes, in mysterious ways, those fleeting signals of desire.

Eroticon is my bite-sized love letter to Eros: a subject as ancient as temple incense and as fresh as your last browser tab. Our journey will be visual, sensual, and gloriously contradictory — from forgotten sacred rites to the grainy glamour of grindhouse cinema, from the philosophical eros of Plato to the unapologetic close-ups of porn.

Eros has always been a paradox. It refuses to be neatly classified — yet it demands attention. It can be poetic or pornographic, delicate or obscene, refined or raw. It can live in a marble torso or a striptease, in a Proustian memory or a Russ Meyer frame. The question that haunts and seduces us: Is it art, is it porn — or is the distinction a cultural illusion?

Adorable pinup Jennie Lee with covered pointy nipples, via Vintage Cuties

Amazing June Palmer with hard nipples and shaved pussy, via Vintage Cuties

Betty Brosmer, model and pin-up girl from the 1950s. Aka Betty Weider, a leading figure in the fitness and bodybuilding movements

Visual Poetics: When Erotic Love Becomes an Image

The term Eroticon is my proposal for a certain kind of visual love story — a fiction (or a photograph) that seduces through imagery rather than mere narration. It’s not just telling you what happened; it’s letting you see it, touch it, feel the shadow on the curve of a shoulder.

Think of recurring tableaux: two lovers framed by a window; a hand hesitating at the back of a neck; a strip of stocking against bare thigh. These images operate like erotic haiku: small, distilled, unforgettable.

Eroticism in art often works as metaphor — not a diversion from the world, but a way of engaging with it. The heightened sensory detail of love fiction mirrors eroticism itself: the way a gaze can make the ordinary feel charged, how a single frame can change what you believe about beauty, power, and pleasure.

Eroticism is purely subjective via Artlyst, Top 10 erotic artworks

Carlo Mollino-Portrait with the model, serie polaroid-1962, courtesy of Museo Mollino. Credits La Petite Mélancolie

Collinson Twins and their blonde girl sensually touch each other, via Vintage Cuties

Baron von Gloeden & the Transgressive Lens

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden’s photographs of nude Sicilian youths, taken between the late 19th and early 20th century, were ostensibly “classical studies.” Statues, columns, togas: the props were the fig leaves of respectability. For some collectors, these images were idyllic, chaste. For others — particularly homosexual men — they pulsed with latent eroticism.

The magic, and danger, of photography lies in its ambiguity. A single frame can be both innocence and invitation, depending on the viewer’s desire. In this way, photography has always been a transgressive medium, long before the term entered the 1980s art lexicon. It invites interpretation, permits subversion, and undermines the idea of a single, objective truth. There is no “correct” reading of a photograph — only the shifting maps of identity, body, and place that the viewer brings to it.

I don’t define myself as a woman anymore - photography by Laura Dodsworth for Channel 4 documentary project 100 vulvas

Carlo Mollino-Untitled polaroid-1962-73, courtesy of Museo Mollino. Credits La Petite Mélancolie

Carlo Mollino- Photographs 1956-1962, courtesy of Museo Mollino. Credits La Petite Mélancolie

Laura Dodsworth’s 100 Vulvas: Tenderness as Taboo

Fast-forward to contemporary Britain, where photographer Laura Dodsworth took on a project so simple, so unflinching, that it became revolutionary: 100 Women, 100 Vulvas. Created for a Channel 4 documentary, the project paired intimate photographs with deeply personal testimonies, creating a visual archive of diversity, vulnerability, and reclamation.

“Where would you normally see another vulva?” Dodsworth asked. “Mainly only in porn.” By photographing vulvas without pornographic framing — without performance — she

reintroduced them to women themselves. Some participants saw their own vulva for the first time on the back of Dodsworth’s camera.

The work dismantles a cultural shame so deeply ingrained it feels invisible. Women, Dodsworth says, often believe they are “too much” — too fat, too hairy, too saggy, too female. Her photographs reject that scarcity mindset. Every vulva is different; every vulva is worthy. This is not just art — it is counter-programming to the patriarchal algorithm.

Vulva, 2014 Photography by Michal Jedrak via Saatchi Art

Become a Premium member now and join the extended journey through the Eroticon Zone including:

• The Striptease Poetesse: Lili St. Cyr and the Birth of Las Vegas Erotica
• Porn as Pop Mythology: Laura Sands, The Collinson Twins, and the Cult of the Body
• There’s Visual Poetry Even in Porn
• dozens of additional revealing nudes
• and MANY more extras

Click HERE for the incredible adventures of Lasse Braun in the world of pornography

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