No more man - Luca Brunetti interview
Luca Brunetti
@lucabrunetti_sg
https://www.brunettiluca.com/
Luca Brunetti (b. 1990, Italy) is an artist and photographer based in Rome. He graduated from La Sapienza in Digital Arts, and obtained a master’s in Photography at the Scuola Romana Di Fotografia e Cinema. He works with digital photography and different media in order to explore and understand human identity through the lens of functionalism. Since 2018 his style moved in a more experimental direction, keen to use a new language. His project “No more man” poses new questions about male sexuality and underlines the influence of pornography on the way men experience eroticism.
In ‘No more man’ you talk about the influences of pornography, how have those influences effected you?
Pornography has greatly influenced my gaze. In my opinion, a lot of casual pornography tends to take hyper mascholinization to extremes, with shots, lights and actors, where the man is always predominant and perfect, a fake man, without a face or a person. This unreal aspect creates strong performance anxiety for the user, as they want to emulate a completely fake situation. In the same way the woman is very frequently too welcoming and submissive to masculinity, ready in every situation. In No More Man the influence of pornography is felt with the creation of bodies without faces, without identities, destroyed by their extreme realization.
Can you tell more about the proces of photographing this series? How do you decide what imagery carries your story?
The investigation is a long search for a destroyed emotion.
I have explored pornography far and wide, following various steps, in order to be able to take screenshots and then manipulate them, destroy them, make them autonomous forms.
It was a research that sought, according to my point of view, to recover a lost intimacy in sexuality, at the same time a destruction of a certain type of stereotype, the brutality of an act often seen as mechanical and not as a contact between man and woman.
Your images have a certain anonymity and distortion to them, can you elaborate?
The work done in No More Man is a work of depersonalization of the sexuality of the human being. The work stems from an erectile dysfunction problem I've had for about two years. This situation has totally destroyed my ego, my masculine side. In this period I tried to investigate how to recover my sexuality. Pornography has been the means closest to me to try to recover it but at the same time it has emphasized a series of social pressures that I already felt and experienced, like many other men. The fear of not being up to making a mistake, of saying I can't do it. Distortion, anonymity is part of this process.
The photographic series is now available as a book. How did you find the process of creating it and what what would you say is the added value?
The book for this work is an excellent medium. Francesco Rombaldi's work was fantastic, being able to talk so intimately with such a well-finished packaging and design is really exciting. It's a little sex grave.
Reflecting back, what have you discovered making the series and the book?
It has been a long journey, I certainly grew up as a man, accepting myself as a person, and respecting my body. I hope it can be a push for everyone to talk more about themselves by discussing themselves as freely as possible, even on delicate topics like this.