America the Average

Why would anyone want to watch a bunch of overfed, middle-aged, middle Americans having sex? And take pictures? And if someone did do those things, and published the pictures in an enormous coffee table book, why would anyone want to see the result?

This is the question posed by America Swings, Naomi Harris’ documentary opus of free love in the American Heartland. It is 256 pages of technically beautiful photographs of people having orgiastic sex in a lot of otherwise unsexy scenarios; at the dining room table following thanksgiving dinner, in lawn chairs at a trailer park, on the couch while watching the Super Bowl. The answer has less to do with titillation, and more to do with curiosity about who these people are and how they fit into the juggernaut of American culture.

The people depicted in Harris’ book are not conventionally attractive. Quite far from it. They are the dentists and accountants and supermarket checkout girls Mahwah, New Jersey, Pleasanton, California, Big Lake, Minnesota, Washington, Texas and dozens of other Anytown USA’s. They are largely overweight, over 40, religious and conservative. They are the them we talk about when we talk about Americans. The ones who buy their hormone-laced milk from Wal-Mart, go to Toby Keith shows and eat Grand Slam breakfasts at Denny’s. Watching them “do it” is far from pornographic, but in the same way as grisly car crashes and sidewalk fistfights, it’s hard to look away.

In some ways, Harris’ subjects are as quintessentially American as apple pie and handguns. In others, mostly relating to their unusually liberal views on sex, they are as unexpected as George Clooney at a Republican convention. America Swings is a rare glimpse into a subculture that reveals much about the weird state of sexual politics in that country.

The other question, then, maybe more important than the first is why would someone like the Toronto-born Harris, who has photographed Peter O’Toole and Jenna Bush, spend five years of her life crisscrossing the country, following sex parties, taking pictures of ugly people getting it on in kiddy pools between trips to the buffet?
“It was about documenting this phenomenon,” she says over the phone from her home in New York, “My intention was coming at it as a documentary photographer. It wasn’t about being sexy; it was bigger than that. It was to show this sort of way of life, to show people in their actual environment.”

If she comes off sounding more like an anthropologist than a budding Helmut Newton, that would be because that’s how she sees herself. For her, the project was more about showing real people being themselves than people positioned to look a certain way. None of the images in the book were staged (save some of the portraits), nor were they altered, or retouched. For Harris it was about pulling back the curtain and revealing sex in all of its lumpy, thinning-haired magnificence.