Hi fam,
There’s this moment Audre Lorde describes in “The Uses of the Erotic” where she talks about the erotic as a resource, not the happy meal, plasticized version we’ve been sold, but something that lives in “a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”
She writes: “The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person.”
When I first heard that, I was DJing in a basement in Brooklyn, headphones half-on, feeling the bass move through my sternum. People always ask me how on earth I manage to curate beauty, be a deeep ecologist, direct photography, mentor and coach creatives and travel the world playing DJ sets.
Erotic force, my friends.
When I was playing that set, I felt it in my body: The erotic has little to do with sex. What I felt was an aliveness, a drive. That inner fuck YES that guides you toward work that makes you feel alive.
Since I started building my practice from that place — pleasure, play, the soft animal knowing of what feels right — I’ve been touching the erotic realm without naming it.
Until now.
Last year, Magdalena joined my cohort. She’s a Polish photographer, based in Berlin, working with something she couldn’t quite name yet. She had a vision, an idea, a spark, though her mind often got in the way of her heart and desire. She was afraid of turning her erotic idea into something pornographic.
Lorde draws a clear line here: “Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
Magdalena’s work goes way beyond the pornographic. Her images held this quiet, atmospheric weight — like a deep breath held just before release. But she didn’t have the language for what she was making.
In her words:
“This project began as a quiet form of self-exploration. I started noticing that what moves me most is rarely the obvious. Eroticism, as I explore it, is the opposite of rush. It asks for slowness, tenderness, and playfulness. I explore it as something soft, multi-layered, and intimate, moving away from dominant images that leave very little space for imagination or emotional connection.”
Look at her work. Really look.
A torso in powder blue silk, the fabric slipping just enough to reveal the architecture of collarbone and chest — not exposed, but exposing itself, which is different. Flowers distorted through condensation on glass, their red petals blending like a painting into green leaves, soft and out of focus, the way desire itself often feels.
The looking of her work itself becomes participatory, like a slow dance. When we approach art in this way —slow, tender, closer than close— we are no longer part of a consumer society that eats visuals like popcorn. We aren’t consuming images here. We are in conversation with them.
Magdalena’s work embodies eroticism rather than performing it and that tiny detail is everything.
Lorde again: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”
That’s what I see in these images. The space between revealing and concealing. Between invitation and withholding. Between the body as object and the body as territory of felt experience.
The questions that opened everything
During our work together, I asked Magdalena to stop making images for a minute and start asking questions:
What about your background has shaped your relationship with the erotic?
What do you love about this notion? Not what you think you should love, but what actually lights you up when you consider it?
Where does joy live in this practice?
She softened. Loosened her grip. Stopped trying to fit her vision into boxes it was never meant to occupy.
We built a universe where Magdalena could break free from any self-limiting beliefs and built a visual language together, one that speaks through metaphor and atmosphere rather than declaration. Texture over explanation. Symbol over statement. The recurring presence of blue as both color and emotional temperature.
What emerged was proof of something I’ve been saying for years:
Play and joy aren’t indulgent. They’re essential to development.
Asking yourself why you, why now, why this thing you can’t stop thinking about builds the ground for concepts that actually have roots.
A personal project is the antidote to burnout. You become your own creative director.
A personal project is how you stand out in a sea of images that all look like each other.
We are looking at Magdalena’s work and asking questions to dive deeper into the theme of the erotic in her photography.
Looking into details, cropping as to build narrative, tension and release around Magdalena’s work. Cohort V.
The erotic as guide
Lorde writes: “Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”
That’s the work. Not just making images, but making images that rise from that internal enquiry and hunger towards pleasure, the kind that comes from deep listening, not performance.
When Magdalena started working this way, her practice transformed. The images got quieter and somehow more powerful. More permission to linger. More space for the viewer to bring themselves into the frame.
She stopped rushing. She let slowness be the seduction.
Your turn
I’m teaching a free workshop on February 26 at 6:00 PM CET: Develop a Personal Project Doing Work You LOVE.
We’re going deep on:
How to identify the one idea that won’t leave you alone
Building a visual language that’s unmistakably yours
Working from pleasure instead of pressure
The erotic as creative force (yes, we’re going there)
I’m not going to focus on productivity hacks or how to shoot more. It’s about listening deeper. Feeling more. Making work that comes from that well Lorde describes, the one that replenishes instead of depletes. This is transformative work.
Until then, I’ll leave you with this from Audre:
“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
Let your work be an assertion of your lifeforce.
Much love,
Lola