The difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments

In a previous post Mhambi was telling how he felt guilty for two reasons. One was that I'm not in South Africa.

Mistress Storm, brothel, Slough, UK, 2002, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve.

The second guilty feeling is my fascination with sexuality, with beautiful nude people, in particular women. I'll explore my guilty feelings (perhaps for a last time, because my blog is now being read by respectable people) in a next post.

Porn shoot, Cuffley, UK, 2006, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve

But not today. Today we'll take a peak at Michael Grieve's photographic project, No love lost.

He describes it as a complex work about the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments. Mhambi recently accompanied a South African writer to a brothel in Hillbrow Johannesburg. I'm doing a documentary about him. After he had seen one of the girls they came downstairs togther and proceeded to eat pap and sous together, from the same plate. It was pretty endearing, yes intimate seeing them (client and prostitute) eating like that. "This is not like Europe the writer assured me."

Michael Grieve on his project:

No Love Lost is a visual project that inhabits sexual environments in contemporary Britain. People featured are active in the increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping. What they share is a measured psychological engagement with strangers in close proximity that is a purely physical and sexual union lacking in affection. Fantasy is played out within the frame of constraints and closeness is kept at a distance. Menace is always present, control is often threatened. These are emotionally charged settings, both plastic and primitive, where the ‘stuff’ of life is all too present.

In essence, No Love Lost is a complex body of work that is about intimacy and dislocation in a theatre of sexual commodity. No Love Lost does not attempt to be a statistical documentation but works as a lyrical documentary metaphor in a factual world about real fictional encounters and conveys a sense of the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments.

Break in porn shoot, London, UK, 2003, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve


— Michael Grieve

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