I Want Orgasms, Not Roses

I Want Orgasms, Not Roses is about women, their toys, their sexuality, and the chains they broke out of to be fully themselves.

The series itself is a collection of photography and interviews, all made between 2017-2022. The photos are about sexuality, trauma, shame, desire, acceptance, and rebellion.

I have always been interested in mental well-being, and how it manifests in people. My approach was always different, and this time I decided to examine well-being through sexuality.

Everybody has a relationship with sexuality, doesn’t matter the gender, the social class, upbringing, even if someone identifies as asexual, it is still a large part of a personality. It is not something that can be disregarded.

In 2017 I placed an ad. I was looking for people who would show me and my camera their sex toys without any inhibition. Thirty women have let me in their intimate space, showed their faces, used their own names, and decided to talk about their innermost personal matters. The contributors came from various walks of life: students, social workers, hairdressers, translators, artists, dominatrixes, entrepreneurs, employees, unemployed people, freelancers, wives, girlfriends, single people, divorcees, mothers-to-be, mothers, and even a grandmother. In addition to taking pictures, I was conducting interviews, which let me dive deeper, dredging up serious traumas in more than one case. I learned something new in every single session. The series originally started as a chronicle of sextoys and sexual practices, but evolved into an examination of sexuality and acceptance during its course. The interviews became longer and more profound, the focus slowly shifted from objects to stories and destinies. The toys were the key to establishing honest communication.

While sexuality is free to discuss in western popular culture, there is a rise in fundamentalist values in Eastern Europe and in several other parts of the world. Abortion rights are under debate, LGBTQ representation is being restricted. There is hardly any conversation about sexuality in the region, while sex itself is often represented. This duality interested me very much.

My goal was to examine how we can become more open, more accepting, and how we can get rid of our frustrations. I wanted to help separate shame from sexuality through the use of photography, by making the invisible visible.

(This is a selection, from a 288-page photobook. It is going to be published this autumn by Kehrer Verlag in cooperation with Everybody Needs Art.)