This Oz photographer has turned screenshots of cam-girls into art

By WIll Gray

THE INCREASING DIGITISATION OF SEX and intimacy has inspired photographer Nic Bezzina in his excellent series, Cam Girls.

“I was interested in how… our intimate lives take place in a digital reality. Most people are exposed to sex and pornography through a digital medium [that] hints at intimacy, but when you get down to it, you’re looking at pixels and you’re sitting in front of a computer. It’s as far away from intimate as you can get,” Bezzina explains.

There are hundreds of thousands of cam-rooms on the internet, all promising a level of illusory intimacy with a girl who might be thousands of kilometres away, but what first caught Bezzina’s eye was not the girls themselves but their rooms – after all, what’s more intimate than being in another person’s space?

“I stumbled across a couple of empty rooms, and I thought that was really interesting. So I scoured all these rooms for ones that were empty, and it developed into me asking the girls to actually step out of frame, because it was an interesting room, or there was beautiful light.”

After taking numerous screenshots of the models’ empty spaces, Bezzina began to capture images of the girls themselves.

“I started directing the models, playing my role as a photographer, just using their webcams as my camera. I became a little bit addicted to the exploration, seeking out interesting subjects, rooms and light. I might have gone through hundreds of rooms before I’d find one that fit the criteria.”

CAM-GIRLING is one of the more interesting ways the internet has revolutionised sex and intimacy. Some of the more popular cam-girls make upwards of $1 million a year, with numerous people staring at them at any given moment.

“Some have five or ten thousand people in their room,” Bezzina says.

The experience of viewing a cam girl is uniquely voyeuristic. Log onto any number of sites and you can almost immediately find yourself into the personal space of a girl you’ve never met before.

You can also find people willing to indulge in whatever fantasy you’re after – for a price. This is the internet, after all, so you can get anything from vanilla strip-tease to scat.

All fertile ground for an artist interested in exploring the new boundaries of sex and intimacy.