Happy women’s day post, Pineapple style. Introducing Szombat Éva’s great new book, ‘I want Orgasm Not Roses’. The series itself is a collection of photography and interviews, all made between 2017-2022. The photos are about sexuality, trauma, shame, desire, acceptance, and rebellion.
Éva Szombat is a photographer working and living in Budapest. In 2021 she won the Robert Capa Grand Prize with her series I Want Orgasms, Not Roses, later published by Kehrer Verlag in collaboration with Everybody Needs Art in 2022. She is currently attending doctoral school and teaching photography at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. Her works have appeared in local and international magazines, and websites including, but not limited to, Vice, Huffington Post, GUP Magazine, Ignant, Contemporary Lynx, Calvert Journal, British Journal of Photography, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Neon, Blink magazine, and Feature Shoot.
She is interested in the phenomenon of happiness and its effect on people, and has published two books on the subject, Happiness and Practitioners. Her works were displayed in New York, Paris, Jerusalem, Milan, Lisbon, Vienna, Berlin, Bogota among other places.
I Want Orgasms, Not Roses
The series itself is a collection of photography and interviews, all made between 2017-2022. The photos are about sexuality, trauma, shame, desire, acceptance, and rebellion.
In 2017 I placed an ad. I was looking for people who would show me and my camera their sex toys without any inhibition. Thirty women have let me in their intimate space, showed their faces, used their own names, and decided to talk about their innermost personal matters. The result is a 288-page book with 120 pictures and lots of interviews.
I have always been interested in mental well-being, and how it manifests in people. My approach was always different, and this time I decided to examine well-being through sexuality.
Everybody has a relationship with sexuality, doesn’t matter the gender, the social class, upbringing, even if someone identifies as asexual, it is still a large part of a personality. It is not something that can be disregarded.
While sexuality is free to discuss in western popular culture, there is a rise in fundamentalist values in Eastern Europe and in several other parts of the world. Abortion rights are under debate, LGBTQ representation is being restricted. There is hardly any conversation about sexuality in the region, while sex itself is often represented. This duality interested me very much.
My goal was to examine how we can become more open, more accepting, and how we can get rid of our frustrations. I wanted to help separate shame from sexuality through the use of photography, by making the invisible visible.
I Want Orgasms, Not Roses – the book and the exhibition
Foreword from the book
My whole life I’ve been interested in sexuality more than I dared to admit to myself. I believed it was bad manners for girls to be interested in such a thing so openly. I believed this until I met people who would fearlessly talk about sex, masturbation, orgasms, the clitoris, porn, and fantasies. It was liberating to belong to this group. In 2017 I posted a public advertisement. I was looking for people who would show their sex toys to the public. To my great surprise many answered my call. They also had a strong desire to talk about their sexuality without shame.
The contributors came from various walks of life: students, social workers, hairdressers, translators, artists, dominatrixes, entrepreneurs, employees, unemployed people, freelancers, wives, girlfriends, single people, divorcees, mothers-to-be, mothers, and even a grandmother. In addition to taking pictures,I was conducting interviews,which let me dive deeper, dredging up serious traumas in more than one case. I learned something new in every single session.
While working on this project I found my grandmother’s memory book,which she got during World War II. Memory books are a centuries-old tradition in Hungary—equal parts souvenir and scrapbook, they are given to schoolchildren during their education, full of inspirational quotes, jokes, and advice for their future life, all written by their friends, family, and teachers. The messages in it, that were meant to prepare one for life, often corresponded with the thoughts my participants had told me about their own inhibitions. These lines from many generations before served as pointers for girls. They implied that if you were born a woman you should be modest and obedient, bear the pain and suffering. The participants, just like myself, internalized these thoughts. My relationship to sexuality has changed a lot throughout the years and the project itself has changed with it. The objects became less important, as I became a lot more interested in the owners and their stories. I was looking for means to get rid of the shame connected to sexuality, overcome societal conventions and break free from inherited behavioral patterns. The toys became the key to establishing honest communication.
I’m deeply grateful to all contributors for their trust.
Everybody Needs Art
Everybody Needs Art [ENA] is a hybrid organization that presents contemporary art internationally. ENA’s mission is to integrate contemporary art into everyday life in several shapes and forms. It represents and manages a carefully selected roster of artists, giving them the opportunity to exhibit their work internationally in a wide variety of formats in the most prestigious venues. www.everybodyneedsart.com / @everybodyneedsart / www.facebook.com/everybodyneedsart
Location of the exhibition: Longtermhandstand is an international contemporary art gallery and “soul care center” founded by Péter Bencze & Réka Lőrincz in Budapest. www.longtermhandstand.art / @longtermhandstand / www.facebook.com/longtermhandstand
BUY ‘I WANT ORGASM NOT ROSES’
Send an email request to LONGTERMHANDSTAND: love@longtermhandstand.art to buy the book or place your order online at www.kehrerverlag.com
Available at libwomenstore.com & @nos.budapest Budapest/Hungary
Photographs by Szombat Éva @evaszombat.com / @evaszombat
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