Unporn: the erotic side of the fruit

The visual metaphor, with its suggestion, alluding instead of screaming, can convey meaning and message in a powerful way. Especially when it comes to sex. Art has understood it for some time. Just think of Andy Warhol's iconic banana on the cover of the Velvet Underground album, the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe, the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe with those gigantic almost erotic flowers or the new meaning that has acquired fishing thanks to Call me your name.

In the publishing world, filtering in some way a sexual content is not just a ploy, but a real need not to run into censorship, not to unleash the bigots, to avoid disturbing the most impressionable or younger readers. Unporn, a section of the site specialized in free photo stock, Unsplash, is dedicated to this mass media sector. It is entirely dedicated to photos with erotic / sexual content, but not pornographic. This space, to which anyone can contribute, is a freely usable collection of images that aims to help transmit taboo topics in a "safer and more creative way", but also playful, as its founder Mikael Cho explains:

"Unporn is for those naughty, suggestive moments where you cannot be explicit; it is also for those points where you need humour and playfulness to discuss a taboo. Sexuality can be fun, and these ambiguous images, when used in the right context, are precisely that."

So multiply bananas, peaches, corn cobs, cacti, courgettes, hot dogs, roast beef, popsicles, which all portrayed a colorful Wess Anderson style background, proclaim the reign of gastronomy and botany on the sexual metaphor. One thing that, in truth, even the common man had understood and used since the dawn of time, but we know that in the social age the simplest of ideas can turn out to be innovative and successful. The result of the Unsplash operation? For now a success with images "downloaded over 64,000 times and used by Elle, Playboy, Women's Health, GQ and Newsweek." For the series the power of a peach.