“Erotica is not about sexual sides, it’s about complicity between who desires and who is being desired,” says Odiseo Creative Director Carlota Santamaria of this series of entwined anonymous characters taken from the latest issue of the magazine. “We suddenly have access to this private world of two lovers and their anonymity makes them a possible reflection of the viewer.” Using an opportune find at a second-hand photo stall at London’s Portobello Market—a folder titled Variations on Sexual Technique—as the impetus, art director Jonathan Schofield appropriated the faceless embrace as a reaction against the ‘tits for hits’ mentality of modern media. “I was thinking about that complete leveling of boy and girl,” says Schofield of issue four, produced by Barcelona design studio Folch. “It’s not just the guy doing something to the girl, or visa versa. I was very conscious of making something that looked at it in a completely democratic way.” On a quest to redefine the confines of traditional erotic publishing, the incendiary title has posed thought-provoking pieces on everything from the enduring scandal of Allen Jones’ sculpture to the sexual power of celebrity. “There is a really interesting and relevant thread of using pornographic imagery in art, and it has amazing image power. I think that’s why people are attracted to it; it is like a kind of instant hit, an instant kind of visual crack.”

The issue is about the idea of value in sex—how do you think the series reflects this?
Jonathan Schofield: We are saturated with highly sexualized imagery. I think at the time when this came into fashion, it felt there was a freshness to that period and for me that’s gone a little too far. I was interested in taking images that were of what they were, they were sexual positions, but I wanted to make this a kind of anti-pornographic stance.

Do you see pornographic media as having a negative influence?
JS: It has a huge potency in terms of imagery but I think once you’ve opened it, to me it’s becoming a lazy shortcut, to do something “edgy” or “avant-garde” and I wanted to question that from an image-making point of view, not a moral one.

Could you speculate as to what the images might have been made for?
JS: I’ve invented this whole story: I think it’s this father or some well-meaning guy, I’m imagining some hippy guy, and they were obviously very cared about and art directed but it was obviously this self-published thing. Without getting too carried away what was interesting was that they were probably 30-40 years old and there was a melancholy that was kind of interesting to me in terms of time elapsed and that they’re healthy beautiful young people and they’re probably at the very least in their mid sixties now. It’s that freezing of a moment that really appealed to me.