When Caroline Tompkins was at New York’s School of Visual Arts studying for her bachelor’s degree in photography, she started dating a man who, at first, seemed nice and normal. Their relationship was “pretty fine”, as she describes it, and they would eventually live together for a stretch of their three-year romance.
Occasionally, she sent him nudes, like so many others in relationships do every day. As time went on, sometimes turned to often, as he asked for more and more photographs and in more risqué settings, and Caroline willingly obliged — flashing for the camera in supermarkets, schools and other public areas.
“He sort of asked if he could post some of the photos [online], and it was without my face, and I was like: ‘I guess it’s fine,'” Caroline says. “I didn’t think it was what it was.” One day, as the volume of nude requests continued to swell, she opened Reddit on his laptop, where she found a profile impersonating her, using the extensive archive of her pictures to flirt and sext with strangers online. Occasionally, a picture of her would hit the top of a subreddit like r/gonewild.
“I didn’t really realise that relationships were supposed to be easy and the person was supposed to be nice to you,” Caroline says. “I thought they had to be a bit at arm’s length. Looking back, I’m like, ‘Oh, I would never be in that relationship again,’ but it was characteristic of where I was and what I thought I deserved.”
Despite the awful conclusion of that chapter, the experience was just one in a long line of toxic interactions and relationships with men in her life. These experiences — comparable with those of so many other women — have shaped her perceptions of and influenced her attraction towards men to this day. “Toxicity feels really ingrained in a way,” she says. “It feels like I was born with it. I remember at school; all girls had to attend a class about the ways that men would attack you.”
Yet as a woman who has sex with men, she still desires them. “But I do love sex,” she writes in her newly published monograph Bedfellow. “I pay for porn. I love dick so much that I go through phases of only watching gay porn.”
Her project, which is about to show at London’s 10 14 Gallery, is a deep exploration of the complicated relationship between wanting to sleep with men while simultaneously seeing them as a threat. The photographs range from golden hour shots of beautiful people to anxiety-riddled and often graphic images that create a juxtaposing sense of discomfort.
After graduating college and ending her relationship with the man who impersonated her online, Caroline met a photographer who was documenting his time living and working on a giant 18-wheeler truck. They quickly struck up a romance. “I needed an escape, and he invited me to live on the truck for as long as I wanted to,” she says. “It seemed like a horrible idea, but I had this feeling that this was never going to happen for me again. So I went on the truck — it quickly became very toxic and difficult to get off the truck.”
After trying to leave him, he would break into her apartment when she was out, as well as stalk and harass her and her friends. Despite this, she would still sometimes have sex with him. For Caroline, this dichotomy reflects how attraction often comes hand-in-hand with danger. “If there is a picture of a man and he is muscly, oiled up, and in repose – the average viewer of that picture sees that as homosexual before heterosexual,” she says. “And I think the reason is that those pictures don’t take into account the fear. This is what makes women’s gaze look different — this acceptance of the fear that we are taught to carry throughout our lives.
She navigates the murky nature of attraction for women who have sex with men by using a mixture of photographs documenting places and events — such as a nudist festival in Indiana full of naked men taking photos of female performers — as well as more staged scenes.
One such shot presents the upper body of a man with a hand down his jeans while three leeches crawl over his chest as crimson blood drips down from them. It’s about her time living on the truck, when she had a recurring dream that she was covered in leeches. One day out of curiosity, she took to Google to see if she could find any meaning in it, which presented her with the answer: “To dream of leeches is to understand that something is taking the vigour out of you.”
“And I was like: ‘Wow, that’s so symbolic of my current experience,'” Caroline says. “So I eventually watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I found out that you can buy these leeches on leech.com — and my friend was very gracious to offer up his abdomen.”
Now in a long-term, loving relationship, Caroline is keen to express that it’s not all negative. “I get really cagey about this binary of like: ‘men are trash’ on the internet,” she says. “And I think it’s so alienating to women who love men and desire sex. If you talk about women as these sexual beings, it always feels a bit wrong, but if you talk about hating men [because] they are awful and toxic, it also feels wrong.
“Trying to create this pleasure and danger true reality,” she finishes. “The balance is what’s exciting to me.”
‘Bedfellow’ is published by Palm* Studios. The book can be ordered here and will be exhibited at 10 14 Gallery from 28 October – 25 November.
Credits
Photography Caroline Tompkins
Curated by Lola Paprocka & Caroline Tompkins
Text Caroline Tompkins
Design Jamie Allan Shaw
Prepress & colour proofing Krzysiek Krzysztofiak