Leigh Ledare's Photography In "Pretend You're Actually Alive" Depicts Mother Having Sex [VIDEO]; Artist Tests Social Propriety As He Admits "There Were Some Foggy Boundary Issues"

Leigh Ledare's photography has attracted a lot of attention thanks to a show Pretend You're Actually Alive, which features photographs he took of his mother having sex with younger men.
Leigh Ledare's photography in Pretend You're Actually Alive is "technically capable, [and] some of the images are pretty good" according to the Telegraph.
Leigh Ledare said about his photography in Pretend You're Actually Alive that "the extremely open and intimate relationship I have with my mother ... was developed through the work. (It) comments on the confusion around these sexual boundaries ... through imposing herself on me as a subject, she was asking me to be complicit in her sexualisation. I saw her sexuality as a means of antagonising her father and refuting expectations he had for how she should behave as a mother, daughter, and woman of her age."

In a recent interview, Leigh Ledare talked about how he started making the photographs in Pretend You're Actually Alive: "I arrived home not having seen her for a year and a half.  She knew I was coming and opened the door naked." 

Ledare saw this as his mother's "way of announcing to me what she was up to, at this period in her life - almost as though to say, 'Take it or leave it.' I had a camera and began making photos of her then. She was the catalyst."

Watch Leigh Ledare photography Pretend You're Actually Alive Video Here: 

 Leigh Ledare talked about his feelings about the work in Pretend You're Actually Alive: "The work spanned eight years.  I moved between different feelings - uncomfortable, absurd, funny. She would present herself to me, and through me, in a very confrontational way." 
When the interviewer asked if he was turned on by his photography work in Pretend You're Actually Alive, Leigh Ledare siad: "I don't know what to say ..." he laughs. "There are many ways to be excited. Towards a sexual object, towards direct honesty and openess. I think already in the background there were some foggy boundary issues. What people talk about as being Oedipal - there's a flirtation with that, but the boundaries were never actually crossed." 

"There's a lot of emphasis on me being her son, but the work looks at archetypal relationships; also fantasy life and social conventionseverybody who looks at it brings their own understanding of their own relationships. We end up displacing what is culturally taboo. The work is trying to look at those blind spots."