Michael Grecco has earned the reputation of being one of the top professional photographers in the world.  While building a career of shooting magazine covers for Time, Wired, People and ESPN, and gaining accolades for his portraits of celebrities, he has become a much sought after photographer of the Hollywood stars.

SLV talked to Grecco about his latest project, a coffee table book titled  Naked Ambition:    An R rated Look at an X rated Industry.  To create his new book, he told us:  “I came to the AVN Awards in 2002 and was blown away by the culture.  I thought it was an amazing mix of different fetishes, different people;  it was a great culture between the fans and the adult stars, everyone involved in it.  In 2006, I came back and we shot 9,000 pictures in three days, and then I came back in 2007 and shot another 4,000 photographs.  I didn’t want a coffee table book that was just photographs, so I used writers, Lonn Friend and Rob Hill, to tell a little bit of the story about how the girls got into the business and about the awards.  So the beginning of the book has an essay about the awards itself and then it tells everyone’s story.”

Forwards are written by Larry Flint and Dave Navarro.  Navarro explains:  “Rock and porn performers share many things.  They spend their lives onstage or screen, acting out their innermost desires and fantasies for their voyeuristic fans.”   Larry Flint adds:  “Americans love their porn—we’re hypocrites to say otherwise.  The strongest force in the Universe, other than human survival, is sex.”

Grecco captures the top porn stars of today:  Jenna Jameson, Jesse Jane, Jessica Drake, Kirsten Price, Carmen Hart, Katie Morgan, Peter North and Lexington Steele.  There are portraits of couples, like Tera Patrick and Evan Seinfeld, mother-daughter portraits, transsexuals, and some of the classic male stars, Randy West and Ron Jeremy.  Through the stark light of his camera lens, you find them more human than you are used to seeing them.  There is no soft lighting and not much airbrushing here, as you can see pimples, razor burns, and wrinkles.  It is as though their masks are taken away for the brief second of the camera click—and you see them, flaws and all.   

Grecco tells us:  “This is one of the most favorite projects that I’ve ever worked on.  There are killer stories in here—stories that will blow your mind.  I’m very proud of it.”   SLV