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Sure, I visited
her website. Yeah, OK, I got the book and, fine, I admit I
was momentarily taken in by it all. I mean really taken in.
How could I not? I mean here we have a beautiful young woman
who, presumably without artistic pretensions, takes digital
photos of herself having sex. Natacha Merritt's Digital Diaries
are, as Benedikt Taschen would have us believe, "something
from the new century." [RS Netbook, Natacha Kinky,
pg. 12]. "She did not have any idea about photography
or publishing...That was the real interesting part: that it
was completely autodidactic. She created something really
fresh and new." [ibid.]. It didn't take long though,
as more and more literature about her surfaced, before I started
cross-referencing the various articles, write-ups, and her
book itself. You know what I came up with (other than the
fact that Matt Weiner basically plagiarized Eric Kroll's interview
with Natacha [Digital Diaries, FutureSex,pgs. 216-219] word
for word in his article From 'Tacha With Love from front,
May 2000, pgs. 47-52)? There is such a vast amount of conflicting
information (and answers repeated verbatim from the book so
often they become cliché) that I have decided that
Natacha Merritt is a creation. Don't get me wrong, I think
that she plays her part well. She's learning her lines and
she tries hard, but face it, she's a creation of Eric Kroll.
I don't blame her, I think she actually believes her own story
although I know she hasn't been as truthful as she leads on.
I began to wonder how it was that this self-proclaimed "non-artist",
this person who has "zero commercial (photography)
aspirations" [Digital Diaries, Natacha Downloads,
pg. 9], could suddenly and without trying, break into the
big-time just by keeping a diary. You can tell she's no Anne
Frank just by looking at the pictures. So what was it? Let's
look at her story as we have it...
She was born to a French mother and Algerian father, although
he left them when Natacha was six weeks old. She led the usual
life of an apparently privileged child in San Francisco, going
to French schools and shopping with Dominic (a gay au pair)
for sex toys in the Castro neighbourhood. When she was seventeen
she met Jerry Preusser and although they didn't hit it off
at first, after viewing his "penis file" (a personal
collection of his flapdoodle-shots over the years) she was
balled over. After a while they decided to move to Paris where
she would study law at the Sorbonne. Natacha and her mother
would get an apartment together, and he would get another
one near-by. Before leaving they went on a road-trip to Atlanta
and in a motel room humming with latex and role-playing she
reached for the (Casio) digital camera... This is when the
liquid crystal viewer of our story gets foggy. The first time
she took a picture should be of the utmost of importance for
people, especially when dealing with this digi-photo-prodigy.
This ur-camera has two stories to it, depending on who you
read. One tale has it that not long before the trip, she had
lost her diary and Jerry had bought her the camera to replace
it. "From that moment on, I just started messing around
with the camera, taking pictures of me and him" [front,
May 2000, From 'Tacha With Love, pg.51]. The other story is
that the camera she grabbed was his. So here we have a young
couple (well—he was eleven years her senior) having road-trip
sex in some motel in Atlanta (with latex and games), why wouldn't
a digital camera be handy? We have her own quote dealing with
why she grabbed the camera in the first place. "We were
experimenting with these new things, right? All these really
cool sexual things? But the fetish stuff wasn't doing anything
for me, so I picked up the camera and I got this amazing blow-job
picture..." [RS Netbook, Natacha Kinky, pg. 12]. In another
interview she says "It was a big time turn-on to have
photos taken of me and to play with latex" [Digital Diaries,
FutureSex, pg.217]. But I won't pick on the "does she
like it or not" dilemma. So we have no consistent story
of the camera's origin. Anyway...
Somewhere along the way, during a two year stretch at the
Sorbonne and taking lots of sex photos of Jerry and herself,
she began a web-site devoted to her digital diary ("Uniquely
enticing images which she...generously decided to share with
the rest of the world" [sleazenation, Mode Du Jour,
April 2000, pg. 36]). A bizarre move for someone with no aspirations
in that direction. Eric Kroll came upon her website purely
by accident (as he never does that sort of thing - right),
somehow got her phone number and invited her over. So this
no-aspirations girl goes over to this stranger's house and
begins to down-load a private show of her 'work.' He claims
that she had no idea who he was, or Taschen Publishing for
that matter. It didn't stop her from continuing to visit,
but now it was on a "work basis" [Digital Diaries,
Natacha Downloads, pg. 8]. This is about where I began to
wonder about Kroll's involvement in the Merritt creation.
He goes on to say, "I'd give her hints as to where
I thought she should look for the next model or where she
should shoot the next model or what shots were missing."
Interesting, considering she claims that "I don't
choreograph or direct any of it. Nobody is ever directed,
and nobody's paid. I just set up the lights and wait. It just
kind of happens, and if it's worth taking pictures of, I'll
photograph it." ([RS Netbook, Natacha Kinky, pg.
12] Mark Healy wrote the article this is from and his next
comment mimicked my own in my little black book "I
wonder how far into this Digital Diary did she start having
'partners' sign release forms?" [the little black
book]). We are shown what his 'hints' take the form of throughout
the book; Kroll says to her "I think you need a close-up
of someone's face while she or he is 'coming'" [Digital
Diaries, Natacha Downloads, pg. 8], she writes "'Did
you f*ck him?' Eric asks me. 'Yes.' 'Did he let you photograph
it?' 'No.' 'Forget it, man...' Disapproval, borderline disappointed
look on his face. 'I want to see something more than just
that dick with a leather cock ring.'" "Have I fallen
short, shot the same person too many times? My work takes
precedent over my love life. My sex life is stripped of any
emotional baggage. My own reservations have disappeared for
the camera. Anyone who does not cooperate is eliminated",
"Assignment: capture the moment of orgasm" [Digital
Diaries, Kroll Lessons, pgs. 18-19]. She notes near end of
the book that as it was going to press she still had space
she needed to fill. She goes on a sex-spree to finish it,
which makes it not so much a diary of her sex life as a documentation
of trying to get it published. All these 'hints' remove the
diary aspect of her work as the shots are no longer spontaneous
but planned a priori to the event. The so-called 'partners'
are now fodder to be eliminated if they resist. Her being
involved in the actual situation (in flagrante) is
a minor twist that cannot take away from the fact that she
sets up the lighting, supplies props, and outfits for her
subjects as Kroll himself does. Not so "autodidactic"
now, is she, Benedikt?
To pull our attention away from his connection to her, he
suggests other photographers that she reminds him of; Bunny
Yeager, Cindy Sherman, and Dianne Arbus. I find this funny
as none of those mentioned are close, conceptually or visually,
to Natacha Merritt. Maybe Jeff Koons, Annie Sprinkle, Tracy
Emin, Donna Ferrato, Mark Helfrich, or any number of on-line
amateurs come closer to the mark. but we aren't fooled. Image-wise
Merritt is a Kroll-girl. By the end of the Digital Diaries
the shots look as if they could have been taken directly out
of Fetish Girls [Eric Kroll's Fetish Girls, 1994]. She not
only starts copying Him, she begins reading and quoting Alexander
Liberman (1912-1999. The artist/photographer responsible for
making Vogue and Conde Nast publications the power-houses
they are today). Not his quotes about 'Art no longer being
about teaching people, but as entertainment to make money.'
No, she doesn't use those quotes. She uses the ones about
how he would chose his wife over his camera, that photography
is not art. This is where her "I'm not an artist"
idea comes from. But we know better now, don't we? We are
no longer fooled.
We have, finally, come to the conclusion that she does have
aspirations, she does want to be (or is) a photographer, and
she does want her fifteen minutes of fame. And Eric Kroll
has worked hard to make sure she gets it (and himself, by
association) by coaching her on images and ideas. She uses
his ideas of what Natacha Merritt is to perpetuate the concept
of the character he has created; a savant digi-diarist. She
may have started out that way but as Kroll says, "she's
a quick learner." His statements like "I
can always recognize a Natacha Merritt photograph because
it will be INMYFACE [sic]," [Digital Diaries, Natacha
Downloads, pg. 7], or "Freshness. Fresh sin. An Immediacy
unclouded by experience. Her work is at arm's length"
[ibid.], and "her photos reek of sex," [ibid.]
creates a false pre-critique that we place over every picture
we see of hers. His descriptions are short, catchy. Zing!
Bang! A sales pitch delivered like a sermon. Nail on the freakin'
head. Umberto Eco writes about this idea in his book Serendipities:
Language and Lunacy,
| "We
(in the sense of human beings) travel and explore the
world, carrying with us some "background books."
These need not accompany us physically; the point is that
we travel with preconceived notions of the world, derived
from our cultural tradition. In a very curious sense we
travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of
discovering, because past reading has told us what we
are supposed to discover. In other words, the influence
of these background books is such that, irrespective of
what travellers discover and see, they will interpret
and explain everything in terms of these books."
[Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, Chapter 3, From Marco
Polo to Leibniz: Stories of Intellectual Misunderstandings,
pg. 54] |
This type of thing has happened in
all of the articles I've read. Each one has further passed on
the fantastic oral tradition of the Merritt myth. Since all
they have to go by is Kroll's explanation of her, his becomes
the definitive view. The Bible truth. And like the bible, the
story proliferates and blossoms, and takes on a life of its
own. It doesn't take long to notice that they've all been duped.
Just look at the pages now and tell me they're raw. You can't,
as one clear-eyed writer (I wish I could remember who) put it
even the photo of the guy urinating on her chest looks antiseptic.
These are the cleanest sex shots since 1950's Playboy. Then
there is the question of quantity of shots, Merritt is quoted
as saying that she appears in only thirty percent of the pictures,
it's actually around 54.905%, but who is counting? Well, I am.
In the 204 pictures in the book, 112 are of herself alone, 10
involve her with a man, 20 with a woman, 11 are of her performing
fellatio, 3 of a man alone, 44 of women alone, 2 of actual penetration,
1 of another couple, and two are shots of buildings out a window.
Of the 204 shots only one shows her smiling. The writers focus
on what they want to see, not what is actually there. Claims
of all the blowjob shots, please! that's only about 5.5% of
the pictures. What they are really fascinated by is a young
woman who likes performing orally, who has sex with other women
(and yet is still straight), who wants more sex and is willing
to try everything. Essentially they want masturbation reference
validated by the Art World Canon, le beau monde. This is all
fairly obvious in their questioning, "what kind of women
do you like?" "Do you wish you had a cock?"
"Do you like blowjobs?"
To them she is the überslut/girl-next-door and no one wants
to admit she's just Eliza Doolittle and Kroll is Higgins. That
would just ruin the play.
Enough!
P.
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