LOS ANGELES - Photographer Michael Grecco will begin a worldwide tour for his book Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles.
The free book-signing, lecture and gallery show, the first of 15 in the United States, will feature the book and cover Grecco's 30-year career, which now includes photographing stars such as Penelope Cruz and Will Ferrell.
Grecco said Naked Ambition was inspired by a night at the 2002 AVN Awards.
"When I attended the AVN Awards as a photographer searching for something creative, I found the content to be totally off the chart," he said. "I thought that it was an amazing situation. You've got the subculture of the adult world at the Oscars at a convention during [the Consumer Electronics Show]. My wife and I had a blast. I looked around at the color, the people and the personalities, and I knew that I had discovered my next project."
The book is a colorful documentary of what Grecco calls a "fascinating subculture of America." He said he initially started working on a documentary feature film of the same title and the book followed.
"The book is meant to be entertaining and touching," he said. "As an overview, it's a social document of the vocation and the [AVN] Awards and expo. It's a moment of time. When you take the still-life shots out of their context and you display them, you see the beauty of the object and forget what the object is because it has a charge to it to begin with. Then it gives it a double context.
"The stories are colorful. You read the stories about Kitty and Natasha. The mother was a stripper and she has [multiple sclerosis]. She can't work anymore and has an unbelievably gorgeous 18-year-old daughter, who she is walking around the convention because she is considering getting into the business to support the family. Then you have Alexis Amore and her mom, who flies in from Peru to support her daughter who is up for an award."
The book also features opening essays by Larry Flynt and Dave Navarro.
"Both Dave and Larry's essays blew me away," Grecco said. "Dave talks about his work in porn and how it's sort of a ‘fuck you' culture because, in a way, mainstream society doesn't accept them. It was exactly what I had come away with in intellectualizing the project and shooting it for two years. He put it very eloquently in words. Larry wrote this essay about female empowerment and how women have taken over the business in some ways: how they have their own companies and the girls call the shots, [and] how they are directing and producing, and more."
Grecco started shooting photos as a child in Boston in 1978. Following college graduation, he worked as a staff photographer at the Boston Herald and moved on to work as a photojournalist at People magazine. Feeling the void in his creative energy, he said, he threw himself into photography.
"What I came away with doing this project," Grecco said, "is that each individual in the industry, whether they were exhibitionists or loved having sex, were as culturally and personality diverse as any other field, but they all loved what they did for their work."
