Photo Ephemera is a visual autobiography, constructed with personal snapshots, moments with lovers, and friends, trips, and behind-the-scenes clips from Bruce LaBruce. Made up of two volumes it features a myriad of queer references, gay bars and chem parties, hotels and hospitals, street signs and sunsets, and iconic faces. Cocks, tits, blood, piss and hints of criminality are placed next to cute pics of loved ones, sunsets, holidays, churches and breakfast scenes.
Every photograph captures a moment that has a story in advance and a story after and Photo Ephemera is a way of participating in LaBruce’s life, without being a part of it. We got a chance to speak with Bruce and we was unsurprisingly unfiltered in a world full of filters and algorithms.
I’ve been a great fan of your filmmaking ever since I was a horny teen and got my hands on a cassette of Hustler White. However, Photo Ephemera, really allowed me to dive into experience, well, you! I want to hear, what was your idea behind the book?
We live in an era in which everyone is a photographer. Everyone is taking a zillion photos all the time with their smartphones, most of which are either never seen or are seen briefly on social media and then kind of disappear into the ether. Before the hostile smartphone take-over, but after the transition from film to digital, I took a lot of photos with a point-and-shoot digital camera. I used to carry my phone in one pocket and my digital camera in the other everywhere I went. Those point-and-shoot photos, roughly from the oughties to about 2013, were transitional, both in quality and in spirit – the ancien regime act of actually pointing a “proper” camera and shooting it. So I had reams and reams of these photos archived on my hard drives, some of which I had totally forgotten about. They might have just disappeared forever, but instead, I put them in a couple of books! For me, they constitute part of my memory banks.
There are references to The Troubles throughout your volume one, which feels different under the Brexit gaze. What drew you to capture this essence of Ireland through your eye and lens?
In 2008 I was invited to the Belfast International Film Festival to show my queer zombie movie “Otto; or, Up with Dead People.” I discovered the sympathies of the festival when the driver who picked me up at the airport chatted with me on the way to my hotel and told me that he had been a fellow prisoner and hunger striker with Bobby Sands! It was definitely a Republican-leaning festival, so at the pubs and parties, I got the whole story of the Troubles from the freedom fighters’ point of view! I was given an amazing tour of the famous murals on the walls of the city that tell all the stories and identify the martyrs and victims of the struggle for independence from British rule. It was the ten-year anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, but I was surprised to see how segregated the city still was, with a huge wall separating the Catholics and Protestants, something you might expect to see in Israel! There were still separate bus stops 100 meters apart, one for each religious persuasion. I’m always interested in the fine line between terrorism and freedom fighting, so I was totally stimulated by all the stories the walls told, including one that was a sort of gay Romeo and Juliet love story between an Irish Republican and a Unionist cop!
You also shot outside St Basil’s, where else did your photography bring you?
Oh, there are photos from all over the place! In 2011 I did an insane tour with my gay gorn movie “L.A. Zombie” to Kyiv and Moscow. I was kind of shocked at how “Soviet” Kyiv seemed at that time. They were expecting a visit from Putin and Soviet-sounding music was being piped into the city by speakers at all the Russian monuments. It was about 8 or 9 months before Putin passed the law forbidding the “promotion” of homosexuality, so I just had this window of opportunity to get in there and show some gay porn at a high-profile film festival! I hung out with Pavel Petel, the Russian version of Francois Sagat, and his boyfriend, Sergei Ostrikov, one night in Moscow. There are photos in the book of them. Actually, I shouldn’t tell this story, but when Pavel went out to get some beers, Sergei and I had sex! It just happened spontaneously! And when he got back we pretended it didn’t happen! Sadly, after being harassed and bullied by the neo-KGB, Pavel died in a suspicious car crash in 2020. There are also photos taken in Salvador, Brazil, Johannesberg, Hillbrow, Soweto, South Africa, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Barcelona, Madrid, Havana, etc., etc.
There are violent references, can violence ever be beautiful?
Many film directors, such as Dario Argento, Sam Peckinpah, and Arthur Penn, have found poetry in violence, but it all depends on the context. Violence is used as entertainment even more than sex is, so obviously there’s something primal about it that stimulates and excites us. But film, art, or photography should try to make sense of it, or at least investigate why viewers are so fascinated by it.
How do you define exploitive?
I’ve often embraced the idea of exploitation in my work, but for me, it’s always done in a kind of self-conscious and somewhat ironic way. In fact, I’ve had a show and a book, an Italian monograph, called “Bruce(X)ploitation.” So if you’re going to exploit people, you better be willing to exploit yourself! But then again, one person’s exploitation is another person’s ultimate exhibitionistic fantasy. In cinematic or photographic terms, exploitation is more of a genre. It more or less means being sensationalistic, fetishistic, and hyperbolic in your treatment of a given subject, be it nuns (nunsploitation), black people (blaxploitation), sex (sexploitation), or teenagers (teensploitation). I’ve dabbled in all of these genres in my work.
There’s a reoccurring feeling of lives lost, whether living or dead. What are you looking for?
Lives do get lost. Friends, lovers, and acquaintances die. AIDS took away so many. You become very close to people at moments in your life, but by fate or circumstance, you might end up losing touch with them, becoming alienated from them, or just drifting apart. It’s also a kind of death. So for me, having people that I know that I’ve been close with in my films and photographs allows me to remember how significant and special the time spent with was. It’s a permanent record, more reliable than memory.
There is a beautiful, contrasting image from previous pages, that sees uniformed school kids, it made us think about what are we trying to protect or shelter our kids from. How do you feel about censorship and youth?
When I was a young teen, I was very eager to find out about sex and pornography. I lived on an isolated farm, it was pre-internet, and we only got two channels on the TV. I have a brother six years older than me and a sister five years older, so I got my sexual education from the books they would bring back from university – William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Capricorn,” Anais Nin’s “Spy in the House of Love,” etc. But now visual porn is everywhere, and kids have complete access to everything. In the computer age, kids will always know how to get access to whatever they want no matter what adults do or say. I just think it’s part of their education now. There’s no point in trying to control what they see.
My oldest sister used to sneak me into all the restricted movies when I was 12 or 13. It was awesome, if occasionally disturbing. But it unquestionably made me more worldly and sophisticated than before my time. There’s a lot of paranoia these days about kids and sexuality. All I know is, I had very intense and extreme sexual fantasies life from the time I was a young teen. There’s no point in shaming a kid for that or trying to get them to suppress their desires. You can’t control someone’s fantasies.
How do you approach the subject of consent in your work and has it changed at all over the years?
No, for me it’s always been the same. I had two major rules: 1) Never ask anyone to do anything in front of the camera that you wouldn’t do yourself, and 2) Never try to seduce a subject of your photos or film while you’re working. (If they make the first move, that’s different!) While making my latest porn feature, “The Affairs of Lidia,” for the Erika Lust Co., I worked with an intimacy coordinator for the first time, someone hired to make sure everything is consensual, that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them, to find out their limits, what they’re comfortable with, to make sure there is sexual chemistry between actors, etc. But that is something that my original producer, Jurgen Bruning and I did right from the beginning, back when we started making proper porn movies in the late 90s. We would have meetings with all the actors and discuss those very things. So for me, it isn’t really known, it’s just more formalized… and in writing!
Genesis P-Breyer Orridge, Kembra Pfahler, Karl Lagerfeld, and Beth Ditto are some of the iconic faces found in the book, who are some of the other people featured? Like who is the man in the crib?
The man-child in the crib is Cody Critcheloe of the band Ssion. Let’s see, there’s also Dash Snow, No Bra, porn mogul Tim Kruger, Nina Arsenault, Lexi Tronic, Slava Mogutin, Brian Kenny, Pavel Petel, Sleazy Christopherson, Vaginal Davis, Susanne Sachsse, David Hoyle, Olly Alexander, Terry Richardson, Gavin McInnes, Franko B., Kathy Grayson, Francois Sagat, Brian “Tennessee” Claflin, Christophe Chemin, Travis Jeppesen, Peaches, Holly Woodlawn, Udo Kier, Xevi Muntane, Mecca Normal, P.G. LaVoie, Mrs. Glass, Miss Hilbert, Ron Athey, Will Munro, my ex-husband, my Dad…
In June 2021, I saw your film Saint-Narcisse at Sunny Bunny Film Festival in Kyiv. How do you feel your work has evolved in the past few years?
“Saint-Narcisse” is the second movie I made in Quebec, the French province of Canada, because they have more of an appreciation of my work, as opposed to Anglo-Canada, which is more prudish and less cultured. (The first one was “Gerontophilia,” and “The Affairs of Lidia” was also shot in Montreal.) “Gerontophilia” and “Saint-Narcisse” were bigger budgets for me, made with union crews, so they are more along the lines of indie features funded by the government. It’s allowed me to be a little more ambitious in terms of the scale and scope of the movies. But I’m also continuing to make porn, and “The Affairs of Lidia” was made for Erika Lust, a mainstream, more feminist ethical porn company. The budget is lower for my indie features, but it’s still a pretty big budget for a porn. So it has great production values and brilliant locations, with a proper sound mix and post-production process, working with industry professionals.
Do political situations feed into your artwork in any way?
I’ve always considered the use of pornography in my work as political, whether in queer terms, adamantly showing non-traditional and subversive kinds of sexuality, or in terms of being an affectionate critique of various conventional institutions or cultural tendencies, from the “radical chic” phenomenon to orthodox feminism to the fashion world, etc. I have borrowed strategies from the Situationists, the Surrealists, and from the gay avant-garde, each of which has a particular aesthetic and political dimension.
You got quite a specific aesthetic, raw, unapologetic, no filters. you? How important is authenticity to your photography?
I try not to filter myself either as a filmmaker or a photographer. With “Death Book,” my previous book from Baron Books, the editor, Matthew Holroyd, and I set out to use all of my most extreme sexual and sexually violent imagery. It was a bit risky, because you open yourself up to censorship, to rejection from distributors and retail entities, and even to criminal prosecution for obscenity, etc. We pretty much stuck to the same guns with Photo Ephemera, which contains some extreme imagery and disturbing juxtapositions of photos. But we live in an era of shadow-banning, censorship, and self-censorship, so it’s essential to continue to support freedom of expression.
Is having a message important for you?
I wouldn’t say a message per se. I’m not Western Union! But It is good if you have something to say!
What’s been your most memorable shoot that ended up in the book and why?
My shoot on the Aqueducta de Segovia!!
Finally, what’s the biggest risk you have taken so far?
Birth!
