Michael Grecco's gigantic, glossy, full-color photo book is not hot. It's chock-full of porn performers, from the famous to the never-arrived, and their various tools of the trade, from sex dolls and glass dildos to stripper heels, and it shows acres of flesh. And it's about sex. But arousing, no. It's wholly unerotic. It's also utterly compelling, impossible to stop looking at, and difficult to put down.
It's the bubble within the sex bubble, and Grecco had a backstage pass. "Naked Ambition" captures all the bright pink everything, Lucite heels, trashy stripperwear, het stereotypes and big-boobed blondes that seem fresh from a trip through a 1990s frat-boy time machine. It's DVD culture (far, far from Internet culture) and dated sexuality, preserved like a pornified Twinkie in its format and distribution channels.
-San Francisco Chronicle
Needless to say, Grecco’s latest outing is a far cry from his highly-acclaimed work in magazines like Wired, Time, and Entertainment Weekly. Naked Ambition shies away from exploitation by virtue of Grecco’s revealing photos, which are hybrids of similar works by Diane Arbus and Dave LaChapelle. His is an intimate—short of pornographic—look at the flawed figures who keep the world’s most artificial industry afloat. The book is neither sex nor sexy, but honest in its examination of Debbies who do Dallas.
-Blackbook Magazine
When the family drops by this holiday season, get their juices flowing early by leaving Michael Grecco's new photo collection open-faced in front of the TV. A celeb and advertising photog by day, Grecco favors bold, confrontational images that meet the viewer's gaze with almost uncomfortable directness.
Grecco's up-close and decidedly un-retouched pics reveal every blemish, wrinkle and razor burn. Not that Grecco in any way passes judgment; rather he puts the colorful characters on display.
-Philadelphia City Paper
What happens in Las Vegas rarely stays there. In Naked Ambition, celebrity portrait photographer Michael Grecco presents a genital-warts-and-all pictorial expose of the porn industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. The book examines the inner workings of the annual AVN ceremony while also managing to humanize fantasy icons.
Although the straight porn world takes center stage, Grecco also profiles gay porn stars and offers up museum-quality photos of sex toys. Grecco seems determined to prove pornography can be a valid art form.
-Philadelphia Weekly
Grecco's lens makes Larry Flynt look as dignified as the Lincoln Memorial, while Jenna Jameson channels a satin-wrapped jazz-lounge chanteuse. The accompanying interviews, juxtaposing philosophical insights with suitably trashy industry dish, complete the surprisingly classy package. This might just be your mom's triple-X art book.
-Next Magazine
Some may consider Art Basel to be pornographic in a way…Or not. You see, renowned celeb photographer Michael Grecco is here along with porn stars Jeremy and Sunny Lane, who are featured in his latest book. A great coffee table book for those times when your cocktail party takes a turn towards the Ambien-t--- also features images of Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick and more.
-Miami Herald
Don't judge this book by its cover. For that matter, don't judge it by its title either. Instead, photographer Michael Grecco would rather have you reserve any judgments you may have until you've taken the time to not only look at but read his new book, Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry.
"We gave it a catchy subtitle of An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry because that gives people permission to buy the book," Grecco said. "Well, it's not about porn. It's about art."
-Boston Now
Get an R-rated look at an X-rated world! Renowned celebrity photographer and author Michael Grecco hits Rizzoli Book Store for a lecture and book signing for his new book, "Naked Ambition," a look at the multi-million dollar pornography industry. Special guests include Ron Jeremy, Luc Wylder, Alexandra Silk and others.
-New York Daily News
"Like everything else in this business, this is chaos." This is what Lonn Friend, Naked Ambition writer, told me when I showed up at the Naked Ambition signing at Book Soup in reference to the way the event was going. For an event full of porn stars, it was actually quite tame, and not so much chaotic as lackadaisical.
Dave Navarro and Naked Ambition writer Lonn Friend. Navarro wrote the forward to the book, which reminds readers that "Rock stars and porn stars spend their lives on stage or screen acting out their innermost desires." And, I'd add to that, the innermost desires of a lot of other people.
-LAist
Grecco said he found that delving deep into the world of adult entertainment was a refreshing experience. “The mainstream celebrity world is such a corporate machine,” Grecco said. “There are so many people involved in a celebrity photo shoot — publicists, studio reps, personal assistants, image consultants, entourages — [the porn world] was a very unguarded world, which I loved."
-Xbiz
Naked Ambition Photo Show and Book Signing at Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles
Photographer Michael Grecco give's us "an R rated look at an X rated industry" with his photo show an book signing at LA's Stephen Cohen Gallery.
Watch the video from the event: http://www.vimby.com/video/alt/us/all/detail/2407
David Schonauer, Editor in Chief
American Photo Magazine
Michael Grecco calls his project about porn "Naked Ambition," but he might just as well have well titled it with a quote supplied by one of his subjects, the actress Jada Fire. "If you have a pussy," she explains, "you will never starve."
We all arrive at the subject of porn with certain assumptions, and Ms. Fire succinctly states one of these: It isn't personal. It's business.
In undertaking this project, Grecco turns his skill as a celebrity portraitist to another use, as a social documentarian. The idea came to him after he attended the 2002 adult film awards, the "Oscars of porn," and beheld what he says was a bewildering alternate world. He decided to record that world, filled with its own language, dress codes, and mores, as an anthropologist might. "I was content if my images simply spoke for themselves," he says.
Like all skilled portraitists, Grecco also knows how to describe people from the outside in. Richard Avedon once said that portraitists have only surfaces to work with, but surfaces can of course be revealing. Here, Grecco captures a world of outrageous and costumes, outlandish makeup, and brazen behavior. It is a world defined by a sense of being outside the mainstream, and personalities bound together by that sense.
In these photographs, it is mainstream culture that exists in the margins, eagerly consuming the products manufactured by porn but in turn being rejected by that world. It isn't personal, though. It's business.
Naked Ambition Overview...
"Twenty years ago porn stars did their films and hid in the shadows – essentially pariahs. [Today] their autobiographies hang in the windows of Barnes and Noble, and their fans – husbands and wives, mothers and daughters – travel across the world in droves to Sin City every January to get pictures and autographs from their favorite stars."
- Foreward by Dave Navarro
From the trailblazing naughtiness of Betty Page to the pole-dancing craze of modern housewives, the continual mainstreaming of adult entertainment is undeniable. Now comes Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry, a fine-art book from renowned celebrity photographer Michael Grecco that offers an unabashed peek under the silken covers of the multi-billion dollar porn industry. Published by San Francisco-based Rock Out Books, the beautiful hard cover, full color, 224-page book, strategically oversized at 13 3/4" x 10", will just barely be able to slide into retail store shelves upon its pre-Holidays publication November 15.
Naked Ambition takes readers to a surreal setting where thousands travel each January: the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. Culling from well over 13,000 photographs taken during two recent AVN awards shows and conventions, Grecco gained access backstage and in every other area of the four-day Las Vegas pornography extravaganza. The result is a unique collection that captures artistic, revealingly human portraits of porn stars and filmmakers, both legends and literal newcomers. Along with human subjects, the book features provocative props, hardware, footwear, sex toys and gadgets used exclusively in the adult industry.
For the text of Naked Ambition, Grecco chose veteran pop culture journalist/author Lonn Friend and former FHM executive editor Rob Hill. The two seasoned scribes crafted insightful essays and biographical captions that lend literary depth to the breathtaking photos. Readers will be both titillated and surprised by the journeys these X-rated performers made from anonymity to erotic stardom. "This is not an industry of human casualties, but an eclectic collection of astute, enterprising sexual artists," notes Friend. "Some of their stories absolutely boggle the mind."
Among them...
• Jenna Jameson, the world's most famous porn star, whose majority of fans these days are not men, but women, a result of her best-selling 2006 memoir, How to Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale
• Ron Jeremy, the playful and portly legend, who grew up the Long Island Jewish son of a physicist father and onetime OSS (which later became the CIA) mother
• Halcyon, a spike-haired former ordained minister, and his partner Tassy, previously a successful sales manager for a Fortune 500 company
• Brea, a 3.9-GPA student raised in "a loving family" in a quiet Arizona suburb, and her best female friend Cody, a pre-med student who wants "to deliver babies for a living"
• Erotic dancer and model Kitty, joined in her photo by her mother, Natasha, who knows that her daughter "could be a star" in the adult film industry
• Grand Maitre de Valmont, a professional "master" who for 18 years has trained hundreds of willing sex "slaves" from his Edwardian mansion in the North Carolina countryside
• JC's Girls, a trinity of Christian activists who were at the AVN Awards to save souls
About the Book...
Naked Ambition opens with guest forewords by Flynt Publications entrepreneur Larry Flynt (Hustler, Hustler Casino) and musician Dave Navarro (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane?s Addiction), who sees similarities between the professions, suggesting, "Rock and porn exist to break taboos, excavate the unique, sometimes unsavory, and express full-volume without attachment to what anyone might think."
Grecco's team concurrently shot over 35 hours of documentary footage for a companion feature documentary, currently in post-production.
The genesis of Naked Ambition came after Grecco was invited to the 2002 AVN Awards and was compelled by "the Felliniesque nature of this event, the crazy cast of characters, and the amazing dichotomy between the brash counterculture of the porn industry and the typically formal award show genre." A former photojournalist, he was motivated to create a unique work of journalism through portraiture, revealing the humanity of his subjects with photos that are all unretouched. "Let's face it: porn has become a multi-billion dollar business because people everywhere buy it, rent it and suggest favorite titles to their friends. Some might challenge the notion that a book like this could be considered a 'fine-art' collection. But all things considered, who's to judge?"
A major marketing campaign will accompany the "launch" of Naked Ambition created by Jugular, a hot, young advertising agency in New York City. Provocative headlines along with Grecco's portraits will be used on billboards in LA on Sunset Boulevard, wild posting posters in NYC and magazine advertisements in ArtForum and the New York Review of Books.
Naked Ambition retails for $40.00 SRP. Fifteen hundred Collector's Editions, are also available for $250 online at nakedambition.com. Cradled within a sturdy handmade clamshell box and playfully designed with a leather corset enclosure, these come with a fine art print (from the book) of your favorite porn star and signed by Michael Grecco.
Biographies...
Michael Grecco is one of the top photographers in the world who has created iconic portraits of the most recognized entertainment stars, recently Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Will Ferrell, Penelope Cruz and Teri Hatcher. His award-winning work is seen in trendsetting magazines such as Esquire, Time, Entertainment Weekly and Maxim. He has also photographed authors and scientists, skateboarders and musicians, and the locals he meets in his travels around the country. He is author of the bestselling photographer's guide Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait: The Art of Celebrity and Editorial Photography. As one of Canon's "Explorers of Light," his lectures on photography are wildly popular and he has been profiled in virtually all key photographic trade journals. He lives and works in Santa Monica, California.
Lonn Friend is a veteran multi-media journalist who began his career with Hustler Magazine in the early 1980s. He was executive editor of the iconoclastic rock publication, RIP, hosted his own spot on MTV's "Headbanger's Ball" as well as the weekly syndicated radio program, "Pirate Radio Saturday Night." He composed the liner notes for Bon Jovi's One Wild Night, Møtley Crüe's Decade of Decadence, Stand Up and Shout: The Dio Anthology and The Essential Iron Maiden. Friend's memoir, Life on Planet Rock, was published by Morgan Road/Random House in 2006. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Rob Hill is former executive editor of FHM and Giant magazines. Under his watch at the modern men's sophisticates, he booked covers on Katie Holmes, Kate Beckinsale, Jack Black, Owen Wilson, Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez, to name a few. Hill began his career in the mid-90s with the L.A.-based pop culture magazine Bikini. A skilled interviewer, he currently freelances for the award-winning UK-based Uncut Magazine, where he has published features on actors Christopher Walken, Mickey Rourke and Tom Sizemore as well legendary filmmaker Brian De Palma. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.