Serious Pleasures: These photographs explore lust in the aftermath of loss

Whether it’s the sudden death of a loved one or the rupture of a relationship, loss functions like the Big Bang. It’s this seismic event that sends you spinning outwards, in pieces, and forces you to create new worlds. Sometimes, the grief sucks you back in like a black hole (this analogy is not scientifically sound), but there’s beauty in all the light and life you have built since.

It’s in this state that American Berlin-based artist Mary Katharine Tramontana has created her debut artbook of poetry and photography, Serious Pleasures. The pocket-sized publication contains “poems of lust and longing”, alongside self-portraits and photos from Boys, a “portrait series of pretty, young men”. Tramontana began the project during a period of intense yet “highly inventive” grief, mourning the end of a ten-year open relationship with her partner as well as the death of a former partner.

“Contrary to the common wisdom about grief killing desire, desire was key to my pain subsiding,” she explains. “Desiring and feeling desired again lifted me out of my despair. It woke up parts of me that had lain dormant and showed me new parts of myself too. Through that, I decided to make a body of work that was purely about turning myself on."

We’re speaking at a café not far from the gallery in Kreuzberg where her first solo exhibition has just closed. Tramontana has hardly slept since her Finissage celebrations, two days prior, and her words tumble out a mile a minute as sleet streams down outside.

Desire was key to my pain subsiding... Through that, I decided to make a body of work that was purely about turning myself on – Mary Katharine Tramontana

“Grief is not linear, it’s a wave that ebbs and flows. So it’s shocking to me that we have this societal imperative to simply move on, to cut out this part of ourselves, as if it never existed,” she continues. “I think closure is a myth. Instead, we should think of loss as a new part of us, and figure out how we can work with it.”

Tramontana describes the “creative awakening” she experienced in her heartbreak, the process of “remaking and rebecoming” that occurs when the self is in bits. “Finding the courage to make work about your own sexual gratification is difficult for anyone socialised as a woman in patriarchy, and I had this very Catholic Midwestern upbringing on top of that,” she explains. “I feel like I was only able to make Serious Pleasures because I was in this state of real rawness. My subjects could feel comfortable to get vulnerable with me because I was so vulnerable with them.”

She’s referring to the participants of her ongoing photo series, Boys. Most are bisexual men in their twenties – some are former lovers, but many are guys she met on the street. “When approaching people, I have a certain feeling if they’ll be into it or not, and I’m almost always right,” the artist says, before describing the hours of “talking, connecting, and getting comfortable with one another” behind each photograph.

“At first, it was about making these art objects, but then I realised it’s more about the process, the giving and receiving of attention that goes into each image,” she explains. “Simone Weil said, ‘Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, and I think we’re living in this social media moment of cheap, impoverished attention. So spending several hours with a person, with your phones off and no distractions, just looking at each other and listening, was a magical thing.”

Tramontana, who turns 43 at the end of January, is keen to emphasise that the project is not “a catalogue” of her desires – “I’m attracted to people of all genders and various ages” – but admits there is something particularly satisfying about photographing mutual desire between herself and younger men. Her project comes at a time of increased visibility for “age-gap relationships” across culture, from Miranda July’s All Fours to Halina Reijn’s Babygirl.

“Movies like Babygirl and Last Summer are great – I love seeing an older woman with a younger man and that there’s mutual desire there. But it’s funny how this dynamic is only now coming out as this big thing, when it’s always been there,” she notes. “I even started noticing it when I was 29 – the way younger guys were drawn to my confidence.”

She compares the taboo of an older woman being with a younger man to society’s discomfort with women who don’t have children – something she’s faced herself. “I think one of the reasons people are so freaked out about a woman who doesn’t have kids is that it means she’s fucking for pleasure. It’s deeply threatening to the way our entire patriarchal world is organised.”

I think closure is a myth. Instead, we should think of loss as a new part of us, and figure out how we can work with it – Mary Katharine Tramontana

Consequently, pleasure courses through every line of Tramontana’s poetry, from her horny succession of “FUCK HAIKUS” to detailing the concurrent agony and ecstasy of waiting for her lover to return home to bed in “What I Meant to Say” (a poem that began as a letter she actually posted). 

Her poems possess the same erotic solipsism as Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion (1991), the French author’s stark account of an all-consuming love affair with a younger man, and all its attendant pleasures and indignities. With fabled lines such as “From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man”, Ernaux’s text is possibly the most acute chronicle of being down bad in the whole of contemporary literature. When I tell Tramontana I sense parallels between the two, she’s delighted.

“I feel so alienated from our current head-over-heart way of thinking about love as something that needs to be completely equal at all times. Of course, we want love to be requited. But there’s beauty in abandoning yourself to it too,” she effuses. “Desire can be catalysing or paralysing, it can bring us back to ourselves or annihilate our sense of self. Either way, it brings out the fundamental humanness of being alive.”

She believes her work exists alongside “a real sexlessness and crisis of sensuality” in society right now. “There’s so much policing around sex and dating and what we should or shouldn’t be doing. And it’s a shame because sex – at its best – blocks all that out. It turns the volume down on everything else.” Smiling, Tramontana compares this to how it feels to take a good photograph: “If I’m photographing in the best way I can, then I’m not thinking at all; I am just being.”

Serious Pleasures is available here. Keep up with Tramontana’s work via her website. Her next book, LUST: Porn, Power, Pleasure, co-written with Erika Lust, is due for release in 2026.