philip brooker

no photo no reply

Last year I started collecting online internet dating ads placed by women from all around the world. I found them fascinating. It struck me as a very strange but modern thing for woman to do. To place an ad and look for a mate, online and worldwide. This isn't a new thing. People have been placing personal ads in newspapers for years. But this was on a global scale. Women from China, Peru, Russia, England Iceland, in fact, nearly anywhere you could imagine, even small villages where I couldn't imagine electricity let alone internet. It was almost like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. Each story struck me as if I was reading a chapter in a book, a person's life all laid out for everyone to read in just a few lines.

A few of these ads were very beautifully written, quite poetic in places.These woman not only told the suiter what to expect but also what their requirements were. I became obsessed and started collecting them without any particular project in mind. The process was simple,find an ad that caught my attention and reply to it. I kept my reply simple since most of the woman were from very far-away places and their ads were not very well-versed English. Then, if I received a reply, I would attatch a photo of myself (in fact it was a friend's photo-- I thought he would have a better chance attracting woman) and asked for the woman to write something about themselves and include a photo. I contacted about fifty women, about 30 of them replied. The other's had certain services they wanted to provide that would not be suited for this project. Then I selected fifteen from the thirty based on a general mix of place age and autheticity. I didnt do anything with them until a year later...

I aquired a portfolio of 100 nudes taken in the twenties by the photographer Walery who went under the pseudonym of Laryew. The photographs are of very beautiful women who posed for him from the Folies Bergere. Once again I thought I should do something with the photos. I decided to combine the photos with the personal ads. A perfect marriage of the old and the new. The photos were of alluring women, whose poses seemed quite melodramatic. Very sensual, very sexy but all in very good taste, even though in 1924 they must have seemed almost pornographic. In contrast to the photos from some of the personal ads which were quite open and straight to the point. This was a perfect marriage. I wanted to make the whole project look aged and destroyed just to give it a feeling of being precious. I looked at photo albums from the turn of the 20th century and wanted a feel of a photo album combined with pages that might have been in a scrapbook, complete with photographic corners. To complete the project I added a red rubber stamp with my name and date just to add an official seal of approval, a folly in fact. Most ads I collected had the wonderful request at the end: "NO PHOTO NO REPLY." This struck me as the perfect name for this project.