No Love Lost: Photographs By Michael Grieve

It's hard to take a picture on a porn set or backstage at a strip club and not have it look like a lot of work we've seen before, particularly when so many artists and photographers have been mining this same territory for years now. That said, UK photographer Michael Grieves attempts to depict these "increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping" via his own unique perspective: "'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." OK, so maybe calling the adult entertainment world "spiritually vacant" isn't exactly a unique concept, but several of his photos do manage to convey a certain tenderness for their subject matter despite their ostensible detachment. (And at the very least we learned that there exists what seems to be a thriving porn industry in Peterborough, UK. Who knew?)

· NO LOVE LOST: Eking Out the Seamiest Boltholes (viceland.com, via Tiny Nibbles)
· Michael Grieve: No Love Lost (lensculture.com)

Previously: "SFV Porn" by Vera Hartmann, Jeff Burton, "The Other Place", Jean-Christian Bourcart's "Infertile Madonnas": Deep Inside The Brothels Of Frankfurt, Elyse Butler: Sexual Tension, Strippers Of London, "Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs", "Pornoland", Larry Sultan