Q: What do 76 blowjobs look like?
A: A Slowdive EP cover.
Jason Salavon deals in the art of the average – taking a series of images (photos or film stills) and rendering them composite. The results point up the use and futility of the notion of an ‘average’ experience – the average blowjob is reduced to its essentials (a cock; a mouth) but also carries no erotic charge at all, looks nothing like anything we might imagine or fantasise about, looks to be frank somewhat alien.
My favourite piece on Salavon’s site is Playboy: Decades – forty years of erotica condensed into a polite Impressionist essence. The market researcher in me likes these pictures because they take data and tell a story with it – the centerfold woman becoming paler and thinner, diffusing and shrinking as the decades go by.