Photography is an inherently voyeuristic medium. The human body is objectified – sometimes controversially – through the photographer’s lens. And, if the photograph is nice, it strips back layers of the topic’s personality as well, inviting the viewer to take a deeper, more intimate look. Even the act of taking a photograph may be erotically charged. “To photograph is to carry one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality,” said Henri Cartier-Bresson. “It’s at that precise moment that mastering a picture becomes an ideal physical and mental joy.” I don’t have to spell it out much clearer than that, do I?

Some art and photography takes a more direct approach to sex and lust, though, and 2022 has had it in spades. Here, we’ve gathered a few of the projects that best captured the pleasures and perversities of sex in 2022 – from the taboo and the trashy, to the intimate and empowering. There’s a wide-ranging exhibition by 30 female artists, freeing the nude from the male gaze; there’s Harley Weir’s uncanny portraits of sex dolls; there’s an X-rated ode to self-pleasure. Find all of that and more below.

Opening at Fotografiska Recent York in the beginning of the yr, NUDE spotlighted 30 female-identifying artists across 20 nationalities – including Dazed 100 alum Arvida Byström, Dana Scruggs, and Momo Okabe – each casting their very own artistic eye on the naked body. The range of perspectives shone through in eclectic images of bodies across the gender spectrum, representing the “recent nude”. There was just one rule: behind the camera, no boys allowed!

For her Beauty Papers photobook, Harley Weir appeared on the opposite side of the lens for the primary time, enlisting the assistance of assistants, make-up artists, and just about anyone who could pick up a camera to shoot an array of sexually-charged self-portraits inspired by porn, rubber sex dolls, and the artificiality of modern-day beauty. “I didn’t need to feel guilty,” she told Dazed earlier this yr. “If you happen to’re a photographer, you’re all the time asking something of somebody, which may feel dirty.” Putting herself on the centre of the work, she added: “I may very well be more free.”

Photographer Tom Selmon created Sensored amid increasing web censorship, and the second edition of the magazine clearly demonstrates the importance of pushing back against puritanical Big Tech platforms. “It has no boundaries or limitations with the bodies we show and the way explicitly we show them,” Selmon told Dazed on the difficulty’s release. “It features contributors from around the globe, all giving their very own unique, uncensored, and private interpretation of sex and nudity, acting as a time capsule of artistic expression inside erotica today.”

F*CK ART: the body & its absence just about did what it says on the tin. Coming a decade after the Museum of Sex’s inaugural F*CK ART show, the exhibition showcased 18 artists working across quite a lot of mediums, exploring contemporary attitudes toward sex and sexuality. “We desired to create an area for artists to present recent and evocative artwork that pushes the boundaries of how we represent and discuss sex, in all its complexity,” explained co-curator Eve Arballo.

In case the euphemistic title didn’t already tip you off, The London Vagabond’s 2022 book Cream an Oyster, Charm a Snake is all about masturbation. Namely, it asks the query: why is self-pleasure still considered a taboo topic in an overly-sexualised society, and the way can we help normalise it? Drawing on the primary couple of years of the 2020s (undeniably an enormous moment for wanking), the photos capture blurry O-faces and scattered sex toys. “Our mission was to explore masturbation in as much depth as our contributors were comfortable with,” Gold, one half of The London Vagabond told Dazed. “We wanted to know what was on people’s mind after they touched themselves, we were all in favour of their relationship with self-pleasure and the way that had evolved over years or in the course of the pandemic.”

“Girls are cute and disgusting; hard and soft,” read the tagline for Elsa Rouy and Lucia Farrow’s August exhibition salt and dust. “Girlhood, at its very core, is rooted in juxtaposition.” Shot by Harley Weir, and featuring Rouy and Farrow in a tangle of scaly latex garments and bodily fluids, the images walk a tightrope between eroticism and squalor, riffing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection outlined in Powers of Horror, and Anne Carson’s poem The Fantastic thing about the Husband, which lends the show its name.

Joyce Lee’s exquisite painting of a nun together with her lips parted to receive a communion wafer, exposing a glittering tongue piercing, her eyes turned up toward an out-of-frame figure, is an ideal example of the artist’s playful exploration of sexual taboos. In her self-titled debut publication for Baron Books, Lee adds ripe fruit, oysters, and cherry chapsticks to the list of surreal, suggestive symbolism. “My drawing style is closer to surrealism than realism,” she told Dazed last month. “I prefer to explore metaphors and symbolism, somewhat than portraying sex realistically.”

Myriam Boulos’ images of Lebanese women are a far cry from mainstream portrayals of Arab bodies, that are so often depicted against a backdrop of war and crisis. The ladies in Sexual Fantasies, then again, are captured in a state of passion and unabashed openness. That isn’t to say that they aren’t imbued with their very own, deeper message, though. “Sexual fantasies are all the time linked to patriarchy, to the whole lot that we fight against.” says Boulos. “The fantasies of Lebanese women are a response not simply to politics or the economy, but to your entire social situation in Lebanon.”

Can photography truly document love? That query is at the center of Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, the Simon Baker-curated exhibition held at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris this summer. Featuring a few of the most important photographers of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, the show took a multifaceted approach to the topic, exploring the erotic, familial, playful and taboo. As Baker says: “These artists are inviting us into their intimate and personal lives and making a really generous offer to the viewer.”

The influence of the late Japanese femdom artist Namio Harukawa looms large in Rémi Lamandé portraits of curve model Lovisa Lager. In a single photo, a blindfolded man in Shibari ropes dangles from the ceiling as Lager laughs into the camera; in one other, a submissive is submerged in a bath together with his face buried in her buttocks. “The bath picture wasn’t alleged to be like that, but we felt it might be higher if Seth’s face was inside Lovisa’s butt and he happily jumped in,” Lamandé told Dazed back in April. “What I really like about this project is that it’s friends making images together and trust is so necessary on this environment.” 

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