Sex makes people uncomfortable; isn’t it obvious? “Blow(up)job” captures this sentiment on Harvard’s campus. Our process reveals as much about sex as the photographs themselves. When we were brainstorming about this issue, shooting with sex dolls immediately popped into our heads. The idea to create tender and intimate moments with blow-up dolls for an issue about sex seemed obvious. But even more so, we were interested in how people on Harvard’s campus would view the dolls on the page, and how they would view the dolls in the moment. We chose to shoot at locations that define Harvard, contrasting, or maybe even bolstering, Harvard’s flawlessly cultivated image with inflatable dolls having sex.
Our first picture was our male sex doll giving the famous John Harvard statue a blow job. On a hallowed location, for tourists, our photography displaced for 5 minutes the people who had traveled half-way across the world to rub John Harvard’s toe. They were dumbfounded when they saw the legendary founder of Harvard receiving fellatio. We realized that the reactions we got from onlookers were as telling as the pictures themselves. Contrary to what we imagined in these public places, people complimented us on our confidence, asked to take pictures with us and the dolls, and admired us from a distance. We started the day transporting the dolls wrapped in bed sheets like dead bodies and ended the day carrying the dolls around with inflatable genitalia for everyone to see.
This transition in our attitude shows what we hope you might take away from these photographs. We started by trying to take something taboo and push into the daylight. We ended realizing that what we thought was offensive to other people actually wasn’t. It was beautiful.
Noah Tavares ’24 (noahtavares@college.harvard.edu) is a balloon artist of sorts.
Ghislaine Taubman ’24 (gtaubman@college.harvard.edu) takes photographs of sex.