By Conor Risch

What is John Steinbeck's depression era novel The Grapes of Wrath doing on a bookshelf in a pornographic still image? This question sparked New York-based artist Laura Carton's interest in how porn sets are constructed and led her to create her "Stripped" series of photographic works, which will be published this month by Nazraeli Press. In 1999, Carton was looking at a porn image on the Web of a couple in a living room. Bored by the subjects of the photograph, she began to notice items in the scene. There was a model Corvette on a shelf, but it was Steinbeck's classic American novel that caused her to pause.

"In a sense I deconstructed the porn set," she recalls. "There are these fantasies that are constructed for viewer identification. So I started looking and asking, 'Why is top-shelf alcohol in some and bottom-shelf in others? Why are these faux old master paintings in some?' They were trying to set the scenes of different classes and races. . . . I just became really fascinated by that and felt the bodies are really camouflaging this whole other subject."

Carton figured out that she could shift the narrative of porn images she downloaded from the internet by removing the bodies and then reconstructing the gap left in backgrounds using Photoshop.

After she removed the bodies from the images, the leftover scenes often looked banal or clichéd: A bare-backed white horse standing on a bluff overlooking a fake coastline; a mail truck parked next to mailboxes with their doors agape; a dentist's office; a miniature golf course. Carton chose to leave objects like a shovel or surf board standing impossibly in some of the images to hint at the removed action. She also titled the pictures after the URL's of the sites where she found them. "You come to understand it's from porn and then the viewer has a re-read and says, 'Where were the bodies and what was going on?'" she says.

Carton was able to download large files so she could make large C-prints of the images. She first showed the work early in the decade and was planning to release the book in 2003 but she put her artistic practice on hold to be with her father during a protracted illness. When she again approached Nazraeli publisher Chris Pichler a year ago, she was happy to learn that he was still interested in releasing the book.

Carton says she has never had any copyright complaints, unlike many other artists who have co-opted images to create artworks, and she has no explanation as to why. Although there is no camera involved in her work and she does not consider herself a photographer, she does classify these as photographic works, and she says that all types of collectors have taken an interest.

"It was something people never considered looking at," she says when asked about the appeal of the work. She acknowledges that other photographers have looked at the porn industry in various ways, "But what I'm doing is a really different gesture and process. I think the erasure is really important."

Plus, she says, "Some people don't even look at porn so they have no idea what types of imagery are going on, but they can look at this. It's good, clean fun."