Taken from the May 2001 issue of Dazed

Jeff Burton's Dreamland depicts a world of wonder where pornographic couplings take place within the polite interiors of Hollywood homes. A ballet of sexual dependency enacted among chintz furnishings. These fragmented impressions also document an unseen story; that of a shy, Texan-born, fine arts graduate who became a stills photographer within the brash and decadent Southern Californian world of hard-core pornography and who retained a degree of innocence in an environment whose sole purpose is to annihilate it.

Existing within a world fraught with symbolic danger, Burton's Dreamland has parallels with Lewis Carroll's Wonderland. But while Carroll's dream odyssey narrates a child's fall from innocence, Burton's journey has resulted in its renewal. He confesses to being a private consumer of porn before his entry into the industry 11 years ago. "Although I enjoyed watching it," he says, " I was a bit afraid of it, or the idea of how it was created." Driven by a mixture of prurient interest, paralysing fear and a more pressing need to pay the rent, Burton answered a magazine ad looking for people to work on adult film sets. His anxiety at what kind of monsters the industry concealed was such that, on going to the job interview, he instructed his room-mate to alert the authorities if he subsequently disappeared.

Gaining employment as a stills photographer, he was required to t ip-toe through a panorama of porno set-ups, snapping shots that could be used as production stills. To alleviate the boredom of repetitively focusing on the customary anatomical penetration shots and cum-drenched players, he began to derive his own pleasure from witnessing what was occurring on set outside of the movie camera's gaze. "I started to get interested in disrupting the narrative," he says. " I felt that was the way of making a naughty picture, as opposed to what you would assume I would be doing."

In his essay " The Art Of Fetishism" (from Fetishism As Cultural Discourse, Cornell University Press, 1993), Hal Foster's field of enquiry takes in works that exist "between the mundane realm of commodities and the hermetic realm of autonomous art, as in the readymade; between the sexual register of part objects and the social field of objets trouves, as in the surrealist object".

Burton considers his photographs documents of readymades, turning the camera away, as he does, from the primary purpose of the action towards the fixtures and fittings. From day to day, he doesn't know where he will be asked to show up for work and who or what he will find there. Despite the porno industry's much-vaunted multi-billion dollar gross, productions are invariably low-budget and shoots often take place within the homes of LA's nouveau riche, who rent out their living space cheaply for the privilege of participating as a voyeur to the proceedings.

Despite his long-term involvement in the industry, Burton intimates that, in some form, his anxiety still prevails, flourishing among the sexually-charged chaos on set.. "There are times when the action is about to start and I get a kind of stage fright," he admits. "Even though I'm not going on stage, I get kind of scared because you don't know what's going to happen."

But although he maintains that he is driven by boredom and frustration, it's possible that Burton's " complicity" in the group production of the commodified sex object is associated with feelings of guilt that can only be assuaged by the compulsive fulfilment of his private pleasure; a pleasure that masks the source of his anxiety in a split-second decision to re-frame and re-focus. "Even though it may look as if the centre's empty," he says of his art, " it's more about inferring a chaos on the edge and implying what's going on outside the frame." But captured within the frame is his dream reality.

“There are times when the action is about to start and I get a kind of stage fright. Even though I'm not going on stage, I get kind of scared because you don't know what's going to happen.” – Jeff Burton

Foster describes how 17th century Dutch still lifes fetishised commodities brought from exotic locales and traded domestically. The visual intensity of this baroque art elevated the mundane to a heightened reality where objects became "at once phantasmagoric and palpable". Burton maintains that much of the pleasure he obtains from the images is in "composition, levels of focus, dispersion of colour, forms"; in other words, the craftsman-like concerns of the painter's eye.

Frequently shot at knee-height, the images evince a child-like view of an adult playground illuminated by the glare of movie lights, cast in saturated colours and deliberately exaggerated depth-of-field. Desexualised bodies are consistently framed in abstract permutations and configurations, cut-off so that their whole being is denied, and oft-times relegated to the margins of the frame. Tanned and oiled nudes appear like resin statues caught in flagrante delicto. The sex act is frozen in still motion, reflected in textures that catch the photographer's eye. It is the environment that becomes charged with displaced sexual energy.

Burton's spirit photography relies on the spectator's complicity to decode its meaning, playing a game based on delicate visual innuendo. Nymph-like plaster statues become coy spectators to the sexual shenanigans. Trees shoot up erect into vast expanses of blue sky. A cat poses suggestively amongst bordello red silk and fur.

"I love it when we shoot somewhere and there's an animal in the apartment," Burton says. "I almost always get a couple of portraits of trie pet. And they're so cute in that atmosphere because they're completely comfortable with it. Any evils you have in the back of your mind are wiped away when you have that sort of a creature on the set."

And there's a sense that Burton is so in thrall to his romantic view of the world that it's hard to leave. " If I move away from it, I'll miss it in a certain way and always want to get back," he maintains, committed to keeping his land of dreams alive.

 

Dreamland is published by powerHouse Books, www.powerhousebooks.com Images courtesy of Casey Kaplan 10-6, New York