Headshots

Headshots collects Aura Rosenberg's series of portraits photographing male artists' faces during orgasm, cropped tight to isolate expression from context.

Rosenberg photographed each subject — largely artists and figures from New York's downtown art scene — in stark black and white, presenting the images without identifying captions so that the faces read first as abstracted studies of sensation. The book pairs the photographs with texts by novelist Lynne Tillman and writer Gary Indiana, and was published by Stop Over Press in 1996 alongside a related exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Rosenberg is a New York-based artist whose work across photography, sculpture and collaboration has repeatedly used sexuality and appropriated imagery to needle at ideas of authorship and desire, including her long-running collaborative project with her daughter Lena Henke and her earlier collage series pairing pornographic images with children's toys. Headshots remains one of her best-known individual bodies of work.