All eyes are on Ellen Stagg in the November issue of Hustler, as the illustrious erotic photographer is profiled in a new interview, “Stagg Party,” about her well-heeled career, celebrity collaborations, and the release of her latest incredible body of work, Free to Be Naked.
Stagg tells writer John Blaylock that her third hardbound photo gallery “is pretty much all my work from the past four years. It’s mostly stuff that I was shooting for HUSTLER, where I would do two sets and they would take one. But a lot of what you see I shot for my site, StaggStreet.com, as trade with my models.
Asked what Free to Be Naked says about sex and sexuality in 2023, Stagg says “women posing naked, owning their own sexuality and having agency over their own body, might be the most punk rock thing that we can do today, especially in this kind of political climate.
“Recently, in the last ten years or so, there’s been this visible pivot where people are really starting to take sex work seriously and respect sex workers. I think says a lot, particularly at a time when we’re still seeing book burnings in the US. Why can’t we just be naked and in our own skin?”
Stagg also talks about her late father’s unconditional support (“he put me through art school, even took me to California to look at a bunch of schools there… I dedicate everything to him”), turning a negative into a positive (“I think my dyslexia is where I got my work ethic from; I always had to work harder to catch up with everybody”) and her shift from commercial photography to erotica (“I’ve been a pervert since the beginning; it was just a question of finding the right kind of perverts to collaborate with”).
As for the secret to her success? “I try to make my models feel as comfortable as possible to get all that awesomeness out of them… all I can say is that I treat models the way I would want to be treated. I believe in living by the Golden Rule, you know?”
To read Ellen Stagg’s feature interview in full in the November issue at HustlerMagazine.com.
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