Nathaniel Ward

"After the Women of Paradise Road" examines commodified women in order to better understand the spectacle of mass-marketed sexuality. Each image is photographed through the plexiglas of the "adult guide" magazine vending machines that line Paradise Road in Las Vegas. These appropriated images reveal tropes of marketable desire that include the necessary anonymity of the sexual object, the disposability of desire, a set of clichéd sexual poses, expressions and gestures, and the sectioning of the human body into marketable parts. The weathering, sun bleaching, surface detritus, and amplified layers of separation between the viewer and the women who actually posed for the original photographs speaks to a culture of desensitization to the beauty and value of women, leading to greater psychological separation in daily life between attraction, sex, sexuality, and emotional intimacy.