Pees on Earth

by Annie Sprinkle, Ellen Jong (Photographer)

In 1998, Ellen Jong was at a party on Canal Street in New York’s TriBeCa. As the bathroom line was too long, she headed to the street to take a leak. Jong squatted just behind some junked furniture on the curb of the sidewalk, and her pee trickled down like wet paint on a wall. Being a photographer, she had her Yashica T4 with her, and turned around to her suspect puddle to capture what she thought looked more like blood in a murder scene than pee. Since that fateful urination, Jong has captured her tracks through New York, Miami, Shanghai, and Mexico, the countryside, woodside, and seaside, under moonlight and opposite sunset.

Since then, Jong has amassed a sizeable body of work, a collection of images that fuse documentary, landscape, and fine art photography and portraiture into a uniquely personal statement. The work, exhibited at various galleries, is all gathered in Pees on Earth ; a collection of images that are at once challenging, provocative, intriguing, courageous, amusing, and beautiful. These images capture not only Jong’s rebellious exuberance, but also offer a comment on what constitutes the personal and the political. Pees on Earth is a statement about the ownership of self, of sensuality, of humanity, and of womanhood—all expressed with beauty and a great deal of humor.

There’s a sigh of relief on every page of Pees on Earth. Jong’s photographs assert her place on the planet and, because we all share the act, they assert ours too. It is a manifesto for our collective existence, a cry for all sentient beings: “I am! I pee!”

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

I was a NYC prostitute and porn star for twenty years; then I morphed into an artist and sexologist. I have passionately explored sexuality for over forty years, sharing my experiences through making my own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, visual art making, creating theater performances, and teaching. I have consistently championed sex worker rights and health care and was one of the pivotal players of the Sex Positive Movement of the 1980s. I got my BFA at the School of Visual Arts in NYC and was the first porn star to earn a Ph.D.. I’m a popular lecturer whose work is studied in many colleges and Universities. For the past 12 years I have been collaborating on art projects with her partner, an artist and UCSC professor, Beth Stephens. We are movers and shakers in the new “ecosex movement,” committed to making environmentalism more sexy, fun, and diverse. In 2013, I proudly received the Artist/Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International at Stanford, and was awarded the Acker Award for Excellence in the Avant Garde.