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Naked Came the Really Strange Interiors
By JOHN LELAND for NYT 10/19/00
JUSTIN JORGENSEN was visiting the
office of a friend who works in the
online pornography business last year,
and he was appalled by what he saw. Mr.
Jorgensen, 25, is not easily shocked, but
there was something profoundly unsettling
in the amateur photographs.
Those drapes! That wall clock! The laundry
on the bed!
The naked guy in the foreground was one
thing, but the stuffed marlin on the wall was
scandalous.
Because the transgressions were so
shocking, and because he had a lot of time
on his hands, Mr. Jorgensen, an interior
designer, decided to do something about it.
He created Obscene Interiors, a Web page
that set its sights on what to him was the
truly offensive side of the pornography
world. Which is to say, the décor.
Culling pictures from gay pornography
sites, he electronically blotted over the
naked bodies to remove all taint of sexuality
and called viewers' attention to the nasty
bits: the clashing light switch plate, the
stereo speaker used as a shelf, the pile of
magazines splayed on the floor.
The doctored photos may be in wildly bad
taste, but they are not smutty, nor does the
site provide links to any real pornography.
In the one instance in which the silhouette
was suggestive, Mr. Jorgensen altered the
image digitally to remove the suggestion.
Mr. Jorgensen and another interior
designer, who uses the name Kyle B. to
avoid trouble at work, added snippy
comments in the margins. Last December,
Mr. Jorgensen put the results on his
design-themed site on the Internet,
Justinspace.com. The pictures get about
1,400 hits a day, he said.
By its authors' lights, the site provides a critique whose time has come. To paraphrase
Justice Potter Stewart's famous remark about obscenity, Mr. Jorgensen may not be able to
define it, but he knows an obscene interior when he sees it.
"If someone's going to go out to a nightclub or a party, they get all dolled up," said Mr.
Jorgensen, who works as a designer for theme parks. "Yet, here people are taking pictures of
themselves in the nude and they don't bother even cleaning up a little or vacuuming."
Kyle B, who saw only the altered images, likened the results to photos from a "crime scene,
with a chalk outline" where the body should be.
The crimes are manifold. Mr. Jorgensen began compiling a list of recurring offenses. "My
biggest pet peeve is people putting lamps on top of speakers," he said. "I don't know why
this is happening all the time. It really concerns me."
The worst crimes, predictably, are those of ego. Just as amateur pornography subjects flaunt
their bodies, flaws and all, they appear equally unself-conscious about their homes. "It's like
some sort of weird self- delusion that people are only going to look at them, and not pay
attention to the trash on the floor behind them," Mr. Jorgensen said.
Mr. Jorgensen himself lives and works in a boxy, kitsch-filled apartment in Burbank, Calif.,
amid Ikea furnishings and housewares from Target's Michael Graves collection. In his work
area, he has a stack of magazines on the floor and a pile of CD's on the speaker of his stereo.
He is, in other words, but one digital alteration away from making it onto his own Web site.
"I know, I know," he said with a laugh. "I think there's elements of all these interiors in
almost everyone's home."
In her book "Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses" Prof. Marjorie Garber of Harvard
contends that housing has become "a form of yuppie pornography," the new object of erotic
desire. Obscene Interiors is a reminder that those basic desires, once exposed, can be nothing
short of indecent.