Boundary Issues

Distance and Distinction in Lutz Bacher’s “Sex with Strangers”

Abstract

The fields of production and reception of a genre widely regarded as illegitimate are translated into a series of viewing experiences in Lutz Bacher’s Sex with Strangers. The photographs not only disrupt existing patterns of perception and their emotional or intellectual effects, but are also likely to provoke a somatic sensation. By trig­gering shame, desire, and intimacy as experienced under changing concepts of sexuality and morality, the series stages a choreography of proximity and distance, as this article will argue. Through Bach­er’s various strategies of reproduction, these sequences of affec­tive dislocation point to the boundaries of socio-political territories implicit in the discourses of pornography, sexuality, and art in the 1980s.