Michael Grecco’s “Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-rated Industry” is an entertaining, adeptly crafted documentary that treats its provocative subject matter with refreshing respect. Top celebrity portrait photographer Grecco turned his cameras on the 2006 and 2007 Adult Video News Awards — “The Oscars of Porn” — and their accompanying conventions, during which he held a dizzying number of photo shoots with the events’ anything-goes participants.

Grecco’s approach to interviewing some of the leading actresses working in porn movies today reflects his own roots in still photography. He observes in the film that a good still photograph should leave the viewer wanting to know more. “I’m a portrait photographer and I approached the documentation of this sub-culture as doing portraits of the people,” he explained. “I approached it as a sociologist would. I wanted a portrait where you’re looking at people’s eyes and you’re wondering what they’re thinking or there’s a more subtle emotion or there’s something going on that makes you stare into the portrait.”

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‘Naked Ambition’: The MPAA’s still scared of sex.

For some reason, I’ve been knee deep in red-band trailers this week. First it was the new “Borat” trailer, which the MPAA labeled red-band (meaning that it is restricted from being shown in front of youth-oriented films). Now it’s a trailer for “Naked Ambition: An R-rated Look at an X-rated Industry,” a new documentary about the adult film business by Michael Grecco, a prominent celebrity photographer. The film, which opens in L.A. on May 1 at the Laemmle Sunset 5, offers a behind-the-scenes portrait of adult film stars, talking about their work and how they ended up in the business.

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Michael Grecco’s gigantic, glossy, full-color photo book is not hot. It’s chock-full of porn performers, from the famous to the never-arrived, and their various tools of the trade, from sex dolls and glass dildos to stripper heels, and it shows acres of flesh. And it’s about sex. But arousing, no. It’s wholly unerotic. It’s also utterly compelling, impossible to stop looking at, and difficult to put down.

It’s the bubble within the sex bubble, and Grecco had a backstage pass. “Naked Ambition” captures all the bright pink everything, Lucite heels, trashy stripperwear, het stereotypes and big-boobed blondes that seem fresh from a trip through a 1990s frat-boy time machine. It’s DVD culture (far, far from Internet culture) and dated sexuality, preserved like a pornified Twinkie in its format and distribution channels.

Needless to say, Grecco’s latest outing is a far cry from his highly-acclaimed work in magazines like Wired, Time, and Entertainment Weekly. Naked Ambition shies away from exploitation by virtue of Grecco’s revealing photos, which are hybrids of similar works by Diane Arbus and Dave LaChapelle. His is an intimate-short of pornographic-look at the flawed figures who keep the world’s most artificial industry afloat. The book is neither sex nor sexy, but honest in its examination of Debbies who do Dallas.

When the family drops by this holiday season, get their juices flowing early by leaving Michael Grecco’s new photo collection open-faced in front of the TV. A celeb and advertising photog by day, Grecco favors bold, confrontational images that meet the viewer’s gaze with almost uncomfortable directness.

Grecco’s up-close and decidedly un-retouched pics reveal every blemish, wrinkle and razor burn. Not that Grecco in any way passes judgment; rather he puts the colorful characters on display.

What happens in Las Vegas rarely stays there. In Naked Ambition, celebrity portrait photographer Michael Grecco presents a genital-warts-and-all pictorial expose of the porn industry’s equivalent of the Oscars. The book examines the inner workings of the annual AVN ceremony while also managing to humanize fantasy icons.

Although the straight porn world takes center stage, Grecco also profiles gay porn stars and offers up museum-quality photos of sex toys. Grecco seems determined to prove pornography can be a valid art form.

Grecco’s lens makes Larry Flynt look as dignified as the Lincoln Memorial, while Jenna Jameson channels a satin-wrapped jazz-lounge chanteuse. The accompanying interviews, juxtaposing philosophical insights with suitably trashy industry dish, complete the surprisingly classy package. This might just be your mom’s triple-X art book.

Some may consider Art Basel to be pornographic in a way…Or not. You see, renowned celeb photographer Michael Grecco is here along with porn stars Jeremy and Sunny Lane, who are featured in his latest book. A great coffee table book for those times when your cocktail party takes a turn towards the Ambien-t— also features images of Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick and more.

Michael Grecco calls his project about porn “Naked Ambition,” but he might just as well have well titled it with a quote supplied by one of his subjects, the actress Jada Fire. “If you have a pussy,” she explains, “you will never starve.”

We all arrive at the subject of porn with certain assumptions, and Ms. Fire succinctly states one of these: It isn’t personal. It’s business.
In undertaking this project, Grecco turns his skill as a celebrity portraitist to another use, as a social documentarian. The idea came to him after he attended the 2002 adult film awards, the “Oscars of porn,” and beheld what he says was a bewildering alternate world. He decided to record that world, filled with its own language, dress codes, and mores, as an anthropologist might. “I was content if my images simply spoke for themselves,” he says.

Like all skilled portraitists, Grecco also knows how to describe people from the outside in. Richard Avedon once said that portraitists have only surfaces to work with, but surfaces can of course be revealing. Here, Grecco captures a world of outrageous and costumes, outlandish makeup, and brazen behavior. It is a world defined by a sense of being outside the mainstream, and personalities bound together by that sense.

In these photographs, it is mainstream culture that exists in the margins, eagerly consuming the products manufactured by porn but in turn being rejected by that world. It isn’t personal, though. It’s business.

Get an R-rated look at an X-rated world! Renowned celebrity photographer and author Michael Grecco hits Rizzoli Book Store for a lecture and book signing for his new book, “Naked Ambition,” a look at the multi-million dollar pornography industry. Special guests include Ron Jeremy, Luc Wylder, Alexandra Silk and others.

Don’t judge this book by its cover. For that matter, don’t judge it by its title either. Instead, photographer Michael Grecco would rather have you reserve any judgments you may have until you’ve taken the time to not only look at but read his new book, Naked Ambition: An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry.

“We gave it a catchy subtitle of An R-Rated Look at an X-Rated Industry because that gives people permission to buy the book,” Grecco said. “Well, it’s not about porn. It’s about art.”

“Like everything else in this business, this is chaos.” This is what Lonn Friend, Naked Ambition writer, told me when I showed up at the Naked Ambition signing at Book Soup in reference to the way the event was going. For an event full of porn stars, it was actually quite tame, and not so much chaotic as lackadaisical.

Dave Navarro and Naked Ambition writer Lonn Friend. Navarro wrote the forward to the book, which reminds readers that “Rock stars and porn stars spend their lives on stage or screen acting out their innermost desires.” And, I’d add to that, the innermost desires of a lot of other people.