This work is based on a set of erotic drawings that were reproduced as engravings by the Renaissance printer, Marcantonio Raimondi. The engravings caused a scandal and after being banned and confiscated by the Papal authorities, thereafter became a notoriously popular subject of serial reproduction.
The images appeared in a variety of printed mediums such as woodcut, lithography and heliograph over the following four hundred years. The last reproductions in the series date from the late nineteenth century by which time photography had taken over from print the job of reproducing pornography.
Toward the end of this rather complicated chain of reproductions, the original drawings were reproduced by the Count Jean Frèdèric Maximilien de Waldeck who fraudulently claimed to have discovered them in Mexico - hoping by doing so to substantiate his theory of a link between classical Greek and ancient Mayan cultures.
The 20 Postures (after Count Jean Frèdèric Maximilien de Waldeck), is a set of inkjet prints are derived from Count de Waldeck’s drawings. The series consists of twenty images (of which positions 7, 3 and 9 are illustrated as details below) and includes an extra four that de Waldeck mistakenly thought necessary to complete his set of tracings. Each image has been reconstructed on the computer according to the method of compression and reiterations used by JPEG encoding algorithms. They are therefore not straightforward photographic impressions, but a hybrid of impression and interpretation.