Right now I have no idea where or what I should be doing. I feel I’m in that burned out place once more, I don’t want sympathy, I don’t deserve it, I have made the bed I lay in:

I’m numb, I’m angry, I’m angsty, I’m confused, I’m short tempered, I’m looking for something I can’t find, I’m down with a few of my so called friends that promise to call or visit but don’t, I’m searching for inspiration, I need a studio, I need work, I can’t decide whether shock value is relevant any more, I can’t decide whether glamour is relevant any more, I want to see and do but can’t, I want to move on with the business but feel like I’m swimming in tar, I want to increase my meds but the doctor says I’m on the maximum dose without seeking the advice of a psychiatrist which he won’t do until I start counselling again, what I thought I knew I don’t, things are positive, things are bleak, there is good, there is bad, I can’t help comparing past and present, I hate the past, thoughts of self harming have come back, I’ve found in my dad a man I like and it’s confused me, I want Faye here, I see my past in Jo, I don’t want to, I have violent outbursts, I am laid back, I bury my head in the sand, I see too much, I love living by the sea, I want to make more of it, ultimately I think I’ll fail, I can’t give up trying, trust no-one, accept people for who they are warts and all, I’m positive, I lack motivation, my website gets over a 100K hits a month, my website generates no income, I accept me for who I am but I wish I were different.

I got my replacement lens. New; I dictated where it should be bought from and it was. I know, I spoke to the supplier. It felt like an anti-climax. I fought so hard for it, when I got it I had nothing left to fight for.

I went out and bought a Leica D-Lux 4. I want to shoot wedding reportage and I have a couple of projects in mind. I want to try the Leica CCD before I commit to an M8.2.

I have 6 local girls I can shoot right now but I lack inspiration. I actually want to shoot Hollie but she’s incommunicado right now. I can’t offer the 6 anything when I feel I’m just going through the motions. Unlike my London apartment, although much bigger, my Cornwall house is set out differently and doesn’t make for good studio space. To do these girls and my own work justice I need to be able to set out my lights properly.

Part of the Church work is definitely the shock value, though in our time, the beginning of the 21st century shock is hard to come by. The only people shocked by what I do are the devout. Most people are desensitised to shock, to religion, to horror. I questioned what shock is and how far I need to go to shock and I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that unless I find what I’m doing obscene myself I doubt I’ll shock many others. I don’t want to push myself that far.

We live in a world where car crashes are entertainment… How can I compete with that? Death is entertainment… How can I compete with that. Humanity is desensitised. Look at the horror and macabre gallery here on dA, people find the work beautiful. Tanya does a great job every month showing us the best of the best of blood soaked photographs; people sucking on razor blades, syringes hanging from drug riddled skanks, hangings, mutilations, fake dead bodies washed up on the shore of life. I myself have dipped my toe in these waters. To really shock I need to immerse myself and take to swimming in these waters.

Twenty five years ago, in 1983/4, the British Board of Film Classification decided that video tapes needed to have the same age classifications that film had. Video at the time was a free for all without censorship. Overnight, what became known as the video nasty act was made law and a whole bunch of films became illegal to own or rent. I made a mint, a really pretty penny selling these films as pirate copies. I was already selling pirate porn, a few horror movies added to the mix couldn’t hurt.

People that had never even heard of Last House on the Left, Driller Killer, I Spit on your Grave and Faces of Death suddenly wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It was a media frenzy; watch Zombie Flesh Eaters and Cannibal Holocaust the tabloids stated and you’ll all become serial killers. We must be protected, we mustn’t have free will and the right to decide on our own what is good or bad for us. The now protected masses, probably unaware beforehand that these films even existed were now unable to make up their own minds unless they came to me, or people like me. We pirate film dealers had a captive audience.

The average person becomes immune to stimuli rather quickly. If I take myself as an example, selling porn, I became bored of it almost instantly. I had banks of video duplication machines running day and night. I watched a lot of what I sold not for titillation but to make sure what I was selling was of good enough quality for my customers to keep coming back for more. To this day I cannot sit down and watch a porn movie. As I’ve said before in my journals, whatever way you swing it, whatever way you film it, whatever the combinations of sexes and numbers it all comes down to fucking and sucking. It is only; fucking and sucking.

I am completely desensitised to it. However pretty the cast, whether male/female, female/female, male/male… Whatever hole is being filled with whatever body part or kitchen utensil it bores me. Who then needs the stimuli? The young and inexperienced? Curiosity is part of humanities make up. The highly sexed and those lacking the ability to get sexual partners? It caters to a need.

Once one becomes desensitised to normal (ish) sex where does one turn to for kicks? Animal Farm? There was always a call for Animal Farm. I refused to deal in it. I could never decide whether the people that asked for it were genuinely turned on by the idea or whether there was a car crash mentality surrounding it. The same with Scat and Watersports. What in fact had happened was that I had become the censor myself. I couldn’t understand how people could get turned on by defecating on one another so refused to give people the opportunity. To be completely honest, it didn’t bother me but I didn’t like it either.

Then I discovered the Japanese porn market. As with all things, the Japanese had turned porn into an art. While watching a drugged Danish girl get fucked by a pig or a Great Dane left me cold, watching a Japanese girl trying to stuff a bucket load of baby eels up her vagina amused me in some odd way. While the Danish girls always looked forced, drugged or coerced into what they did on the farm the Japanese girls seemed willing in some way. While just as perverse, the Japanese films were so out there they almost seemed like parody. They seemed comedic in some way. Perhaps eels are funnier than dogs? Perhaps because the eels were unwitting participants and the pigs and dogs seemed only too willing? Perhaps the absurdity of watching a bucket full of eels escaping all over the set was more like Benny Hill and National Lampoon than Hostel?

Oh those crazy Japanese… Not content with eels, anything with tentacles became game. Anything from the sea in fact. You have to love the twisted morality… While it was illegal to show pubic hair and the genital area was more often than not blurred out or covered with a mosaic it was alright to fill a vagina with live fish.

What we in the West made sordid, the East made art. While bondage in the West during the 70s and early 80s comprised mainly of badly printed booklets showing men in inflatable rubber suits and hoods or Wellington boots and rubber Macs the East had Shibari; Bondage as an art form. While in the West we were training German Shepherds to fuck drugged women wearing dayglo wigs and overly large sunglasses to hide their identities the Japanese had Wakamezake and Nyotaimori. While in the West, forced sex films tried their hardest to be as brutal as possible; where rape was taken almost to the level of snuff and made to seem as unpleasant as it would be in real life the Japanese take on this was Chikan; rubbing of the genitals on unsuspecting teens on the subway and the odd crafty boob grab.

To this day, one of the funniest things I have ever seen though in no way sexually arousing is a video of two Japanese girls indulging in emetophilia or Roman Showers. The thing that amuses me most about this short clip is the humour… Neither girl seems forced, in fact the girl actually vomiting seems to be enjoying herself no end and giggles helplessly all the way through.

So back to the story; questioning my own need to shock through photography and feeling completely numb and uninspired I went on a soul searching mission to uncover my motives and find something to nudge me back into a world where I felt something. I wanted to be horrified. I wanted to be shocked. I wanted to feel revulsion. Fuck, I just wanted to feel. Something, anything, other than the stress and anger I have been feeling. Sickened to the pit of my stomach has got to be better than nothing right?

I started in the past…

What was considered vile enough to ban in 1984 is now freely available at any good video store. Zombie Flesh Eaters is now branded ‘UNCUT’ and ‘REMASTERED’ you can now experience it in the comfort of your own living room in 5:1 surround sound and HD video. We who now watch real war on prime time TV in HD widescreen can also watch the beauty of Rape and Revenge that is I Spit on your Grave. Better than that… Why watch the originals of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Last House on the Left when we can watch the bloodier, more violent remakes? There seems to be a fashion right now… Take a classic horror from the 80s and bring it up to date for the desensitised. Which is the better film? Carpenters Halloween or Rob Zombies Halloween?

I started in the past; over the past few weeks I’ve watched; Cannibal Ferox, Cannibal Holocaust, Zombie Flesh Eaters, Last House on the Left and Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. I enjoyed them as much as I did in the 80s.

What the general public never knew was that while the media pounced on the horror blockbusters, if they can be called that, was that there was an underground movement producing art house movies far more shocking. From Japan came the Guinea Pig series… Flowers of Flesh and Blood, The Devils Experiment and He Never Dies. While Faces of Death was reviled few people knew the Mondo genre had spawned far more shocking films like Traces of Death where nothing was staged unlike Faces and Japans The Death Files. Love it or hate it, Tobe Hoopers Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a classic piece of film making. Dealing with Cannibalism and Necrophilia it touched a raw nerve in many people. It was all the more shocking in that it was based on the true story of Ed Gein. Take then the little known films from Jörg Buttgereit; Nekromantik and Nekromantik 2 where necrophilia becomes romanticised and the protagonists fall in love and run off with their corpses preferring them over the living. 1976s In the Realm of the Senses went a little further giving us unsimulated sex and a castration to boot.

I dipped my toe here too. Still I wasn’t moved. I’d seen them before… I needed something new. Oh font of all knowledge that is Google, show me your wares, lead me to the forums. “Come” said Pinhead “We have such sights to show you”.

I need not go into detail regarding the films here but I found and didn’t find what I was looking for… It seems (unless anyone can tell me otherwise) that the most shocking films of all time are as follows; August Underground, August Underground Mordum, August Underground Penance, Salo, Requiem for a Dream, Irreversible, I Stand Alone, Tokyo Gore Police and Visitor Q.

While not easy watching, some for their graphic content, some for their depressive subject matter and some for being just shock for the sake of shock I can honestly say that I am still unmoved. If I am moved in any way it would be the need to question why some people have gone to the lengths of say “Mordum” to utterly repulse the general public. A public that won’t search out these films anyway.

To bring it back into context I cannot compete and don’t want to compete with these movies. If the general public want to be shocked they need to see these movies. The lengths I would have to go to to surpass them would be far out of my comfort zone. Maybe comfort zone is the wrong phrase? I feel desensitised to the point where I could portray as bad as or even worse images as these films but why would I want to? What would I achieve and what point would I be proving? I need to rethink my motives and desires.

What would you like to see from me in the future?