Nika Nesgoda

works

VIRGIN

BabyCakes

Landscrapes

FREE TO A GOOD HOME

THIS IS NOT A TEST

ON SHOOTING BEAUTY

JANE DOE NO. 21

LOVE BOMB

21ST CENTURY AURA-ING

OUCH

ENCAUSTIC

The inspiration for the VIRGIN series came to me in 2002, while I was reading about the lives and artwork of the Old Masters. I was astonished to discover that artists such as Caravaggio, who were best remembered for their church-commissioned paintings, frequently turned to prostitutes and other marginalized women when seeking models for their paintings. Digging more deeply into the stories and lives of these little-known women, I uncovered the back story of Caravaggio’s “The Death of the Virgin” (ca. 1604-1606). According to countless art historians, the artist appointed his mistress, a known prostitute, as his model for many of his paintings which portray the life of the Virgin Mary. The traditional Christian iconography was stripped away and the Virgin was displayed postmortem, as a corporeal being, rather than as an ethereal spirit’s assumption into heaven. The parish of the Carmelite church of Santa Maria della Scala rejected the painting, however, believing it sacrilege to display. The painting then disappeared from public view for years, before eventually coming to reside at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

This 17th-century sex scandal, variations on which have played out in the years since, led me to think about the fact that, for centuries, the treatment of women in works of art has been dichotomous. To be a muse, you were either a virgin or a whore. Were things really any different in the 21st century? Was either of these narrow depictions at all fair to women? I also thought about the Virgin Mary, a frequent subject of paintings in Caravaggio’s time and so many others, who had so little to say in the Bible. The Virgin is portrayed as an untouchable, inhuman figure. On the other hand, was the Virgin entirely antithetic of the models who posed for the artists depicting her?

With this refreshed backdrop story in mind, I asked myself: who could be considered one of today’s misunderstood cultural icons? Immediately, porn stars came to mind. These people are mostly visuals; they have millions of followers, but we don’t really know who they are or how they came to be. We don’t hear their voice. Like the Virgin Mary, porn stars are icons. They are a cultural force, but they are rarely thought of as real people. Notably, they also share a similar profession to so many of the women who, centuries before them, served as models for the all-male Old Masters as they painted the Virgin Mary in so many church-commissioned works of art.

With all of this in mind, I sought to recreate these paintings centuries later, as a hagiographic photographic series. This time employing women from the adult entertainment industry as stand-ins for the Virgin Mary. I drew from Renaissance-era paintings depicting Mary, such as Simone Martini’s “Annunciation,” painted in 1333; “The Visitation,” painted by Fra Angelico in 1434; and Titian’s “Virgin Dolorosa With Her Hands Apart,” from 1555, among others, as I mapped out the life of the Virgin Mary, beginning with the Immaculate Conception and continuing the narrative of her life, death, and Assumption into Heaven. I shot my photographs using saturated colors and chiaroscuro lighting inspired by artists like Caravaggio, paying careful attention to skin and fabrics; I also incorporated classic Catholic iconography, such as the exposed breast (humanity) and feet (humility). The photos were shot on large-format color slide Fujichrome film.

While I was born a Roman Catholic, I had always questioned the church and its doctrines and policies over the years. VIRGIN gave me a vehicle in which to grapple with some of these issues. However, it’s important to note that I didn’t create the series with the goal of mocking or ridiculing the Catholic Church in any way. I also received a positive response after showing the photographs to a Jesuit priest and nun who I was friendly with, in hopes of assuaging some of the instinctive “Catholic guilt” that I was feeling. Both told me that the women in my series were just as worthy of portraying the Virgin Mary as anyone else, which I found both comforting and empowering.

For more than a decade after I shot the photographs, I chose not to show them, following some early negative feedback, with one printer even declining to print the images. But then, in 2018, more than 400 years after Caravaggio caused a stir among the clergy by using his mistress as a model for the Virgin Mary, news broke that President Donald Trump had paid off adult film actress Stormy Daniels (one of my models for VIRGIN) to keep quiet about an extramarital affair they’d had. A friend of mine sent the photos to TIME Magazine, who published them alongside images of the paintings that inspired them.

This time, the series was critically praised and the photographs were found to be particularly appropriate for the era we find ourselves living in today; they are “imbued with new meaning,” according to Artnet’s Taylor Dafoe, and “[make] a lot of sense,” per VICE news’ Kara Weisenstein. The media called the photos “‘perfect’ reflective surfaces for fantasy, redemption, or both.” To Dr. Aaron Rosen, a professor of religious thought at King’s College London, the photographs even align well with some of the Bible’s teachings. “Is someone like Stormy Daniels less worthy of salvation?” he asked in an interview with VICE. “I think that’s something that Jesus would strongly disagree with. It’s precisely the people that others find appalling or uncouth or don’t approve of [...] that Jesus specifically seeks out in the gospel.”

VIRGIN challenges contemporary and historical notions of celebritydom, class, identity, and divinity. It is an interpretation of classic works in the light of the present, while at the same time confronts age-old questions about how we view the women who serve as artistic muses. Who deserves society’s worship and idolization? There is something both primal and cultural about iconography and pornography, virgin and whore. Throughout history, these female muses were expected to be one or the other (or both), and the same largely holds true today.