Eleonora Calvelli

MAKING LOVE TO G. IS GONNA BE LIKE THE FIRST TIME I TRIED A CHEESEBURGER

SYNOPSIS

"Making Love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger" is a long-term project, commenced in 2012, which aims to reflect on how reality shows, which play on themes such as intimacy, voyeurism, and violence, offer a privileged observation point for learning about the development of the cultural industry and how the market colonizes mass communication.

The project consists of two series of photographs: the first part includes black-and-white photos taken of the television screen, capturing several frames from the DVDs of the British series Geordie Shore. The work focuses solely on the moments in which the cast members/participants engage in lovemaking with the other house occupants. The idea behind the story, inspired by other longstanding TV formats such as Big Brother, is to bring boys and girls together in a house and film their interactions 24/7. The plot of each episode consists of an almost unbroken series of sometimes violent arguments, drunkenness, relationships, sex, jealous scenes, and make-ups between the occupants of the house.

The second part of the project features color photographs of girls wrestling and hitting each other, taken from YouTube videos viewed on a computer monitor, capturing scenes from the reality TV show "Bad Girls Club," which depicts the quarrels and physical confrontations of the cast members. On YouTube, there are numerous collections of "girls' fights" videos featuring situations that draw inspiration from both real life and reality TV shows. I decided to center my research on the video series taken from the Bad Girls Club TV series because they have a well-defined kitsch aesthetic and reveal the construction of the television format in a more evident way.

In this second series of photographs, I used the lack of focus to take the TV message to the extreme consequences and make it more ambiguous. The resulting images, oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, confuse our vision and raise a fundamental question. Do these women love or hate each other?

PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES N°1: FROM "BAD GIRLS CLUB"
The project began in 2012, capturing some scenes from the reality show Bad Girls Club on a computer screen, as found on YouTube.

I discovered this reality show on YouTube while searching for videos featuring "girls' fights." I became interested in girls' fights after watching another Italian reality show, "L'isola dei famosi", in which I saw two women fighting on television for the first time.

The intentional use of out-of-focus images, captured with a Contax T2 camera (35mm color negatives) and then scanned with an Imacon scanner, was a deliberate artistic choice to make the TV message more ambiguous.

In the self-published book "Making love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger" (2023), this is the color series, in the center of the book.

The photographic series is related to "Bad Girls Club", an American reality show that aired for 17 seasons on the Oxygen TV Network and was produced by Bunim/Murray Productions (BMP), a pioneering U.S. production company also known for "The Real World" and "Keeping Up with the Kardashians".

The reality show format, defined from the very first season, involved the cohabitation of women only, selected for their transgressive behaviors and often characterized by issues with anger, self-control, or trust. The stated goal was to "modify" these behaviors, but in practice, the narrative revolved around conflicts, rivalries, and chaos, with participants subject to expulsion for breaking the rules.

Over the years, the show generated 17 seasons and four spin-offs (Bad Girls Road Trip, Tanisha Gets Married, Love Games: Bad Girls Need Love Too, Bad Girls All-Star Battle).

The choice to focus exclusively on female bodies is not accidental; it follows the show's own logic, which casts only women.

In the book, the critique of female objectification and women's bodies remains implicit, as the central concern, according to Debord's Society of the Spectacle, is the commodification of images.

On television, the female body captures the viewer's attention and keeps them engaged, drawing them in and holding their interest.

In the photographic series, the female body assumes a different role. The out-of-focus images push the symbolic message of television to its extremes, thereby accentuating the weight of the societal critique on the commodification of images.

The series raises an ambiguous and unsettling question: do these women love or hate each other? What exactly are we watching? Why are we drawn simultaneously to nudity, sex, and violence? Can the blurred feminine body become a metaphor for contemporary visual confusion and media overload? This ambiguity is intended to provoke reflection in the audience.

PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES N°2: FROM "GEORDIE SHORE"
The project began in 2016, initially shot with a Hasselblad (6x6 cm color negatives) and later with a Mamiya 7 camera (6x7 color negatives). The negatives were scanned with an Imacon scanner and post-processed to remove dust and scratches, converting them into black-and-white images.

In the self-published book "Making love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger" (2023), this is the black and white series.

This series features black and white photos taken from the television screen, capturing several frames from DVDs of the British series Geordie Shore. The work focuses solely on the moments in which the cast members/participants (both men and women) engage in lovemaking with the other house occupants/cast members/participants.

The idea behind the story, inspired by other longstanding TV formats such as Big Brother, is to bring boys and girls together in a house and film their interactions 24/7. The plot of each episode consists of an almost unbroken series of sometimes violent arguments, drunkenness, relationships, sex, jealous scenes, and make-ups between the occupants of the house.

THE BOOK: "MAKING LOVE TO G. IS GONNA BE LIKE THE FIRST TIME I TRIED A CHEESEBURGER"

The decision not to include texts in the book was made together with the book designer, as we did not want a traditional editorial book format. We wanted the book to be a mysterious object, capable of raising many questions.

The text available on the website conveys the meaning and critique of the reality show genre, as well as our relationship with images. The website text addresses the two works together, which were later combined in the book, offering a statement on the book as a whole.

The two series—color and black and white—can be considered together as they appear in the book, or analyzed individually. The overall meaning of the book is about our relationship with images.

The focus of each series is as follows: the color series, which features girls from Bad Girls Club fighting and confronting each other, addresses the female body, nudity, violence, and ambiguity; the black-and-white series, drawn from Geordie Shore, focuses on sex and voyeurism as transmitted on television.

However, the photographic work on reality shows is far from finished, and neither is the reflection on female body objectification, which deserves to be explored as a concept in its own right.

Last but not least, although both series are in English, I do not consider the issues of the Society of the Spectacle to be specific to Anglo-Saxon culture. I chose not to follow Italian reality shows because I disliked hearing the participants speak in Italian, which felt too vulgar. I wanted to maintain a certain distance from the subjects.

The title of the book, "Making Love to G. is gonna be like the first time I tried a cheeseburger", refers to a sentence spoken by a cast member of Geordie Shore. With this phrase, she described and imagined what her first night of intimacy with fellow cast member G., whom she had fallen in love with after various ups and downs, would be like.