Carnal Script, Page 31, 2009 from Getting to Know My Husband's Cock
Ellen Jong is a photographer and multimedia artist who lives and works in New York City. She has authored two books of photographs, Pees on Earth (2006) and Getting to Know my Husband’s Cock (2010). She chooses two of our most intimate and commonly shared experiences—peeing and loving—and explores them fully and completely, the only parameter being her personal experience.
Jong shoots with small format cameras, available light, and often times without the use of a tri-pod or viewfinder. Her images are loose and informal. The use of grain, contrast, blur, glare, and tilt are typical. There is very little control, which is important, especially in Pees on Earth. The images are an event, a thing that happened, was photographed, and will never happen again.
from Pees on Earth
Pees on Earth is essentially a travel diary. It is a collection of photographs that spans several years and continents, bound together by a single subject: the author urinating in public. Jong pees on anything and everything to be found in the public domain. Sidewalks, front stoops, fire escapes, box trucks, front yards, on roofs, under trees, into cups, in the sand and the snow. The images are first and foremost, very pretty. The liquid is alluring, illuminated, an elegant spray, or sparkling droplets. In other images it’s a puddle or a graphic splotch on the pavement, like a Rorscach for passersbys. By virtue of the topic they explore, the images are very easy to relate to.
The process that Jong develops in Pees on Earth is unique, part performance, part landscape, and part self-portrait. The act of peeing becomes possessive, leaving a piece of you behind. The photograph itself becomes memorial, a proof of existence.
Cockatoos, 2009, from Getting to Know My Husband's Cock
Pees on Earth
Getting To Know My Husband’s Cock is similar yet different. Similar in the way that it’s a book comprised of beautiful images and intimate content, and infused with genuine sentiment. But this book has a little more poise. There are many images of Jong’s Husband’s Cock. But there are also images of sex, still lifes made in their home, landscapes, portraits of their cat, and words. Jong punctuates the book with full-page images of handwritten notes she calls Carnal Script. One of the smartest and funniest sets of pages is a full-page image of a handwritten note that reads: “’Til death do us part,” immediately followed by a full-page image of a cemetery. The cemetery is in mottled glow time light, in the center is a tall erect head stone framed by part of a v-shaped tree trunk. It looks like exactly what it sounds like, a dick between two legs. It might be a hokey image if it wasn’t saved by its sincerity.
My favorite image is of Jong’s husband performing oral sex on her (page 60); the photograph is made from her perspective, framed on the sides by each of her legs and on top by her spread hand, which shields his face from the flash of the camera. Her husband’s eyes are gently closed. He is completely consumed, and consumed is the word.
Cum, 2008, from Getting to Know My Husband's Cock
Birthday Flowers, 2006, from Getting to Know My Husband's Cock
Both Pees on Earth and Getting To Know My Husband’s Cock are at once deeply personal and entirely relatable. In a conversation between Jong and Annie Sprinkle—published in Pees on Earth—Sprinkle says, “Body- or sex-oriented media is a mirror that can be held up to people to look at and respond to.” That is true in each of Jong’s books. While looking at these images, we can’t help but think, “I know what this feels like.”
Jong’s pictures are like the conversations that you have on your best friends couch when you share a joint, or a beer, or a bowl of vegetables, or whatever it is you most enjoy sharing with friends. They are about the sensations we all have—physical and emotional—that we admit to our spouses, our friends, and ourselves but rarely ever commit to a public forum. Jong does that and then some.