Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing

A Dazed Review's "10 of the best flesh-baring photo stories of 2025"

"Annie Ernaux-esque"
"Pleasure courses through every line"
—Dazed

As seen in: Dazed, Fotografiksa Berlin, Art Daily, Erotic Review, The Berliner, Siegessäule

Signed limited-edition (60 copies) handsewn collector's poetry book with original photography, Berlin, 2024

"In Mary Katharine Tramontana’s Serious Pleasures poetry is hyper-explicit—both sensual and intellectual—and in that sense closest to Pasolini’s destruction and reaffirmation of poetic sublimation. Her poetics of submission give the reader the option of experiencing subjecthood in either position." Toni Hildebrant, co-editor of PPPP: Pier Paolo Pasolini Philosopher

Against the backdrop of a new era of sexual regression across the political spectrum, Tramontana’s poetry and photography remind us that sex is a fundamental way of being human. Reclaiming her eroticism from her Catholic upbringing and global, secular, anti-female sexuality dogma, her corporeal self-portraits and photography series of young bisexual men, Boys (2023-ongoing), offer a queer perspective on art history’s legacy of the male artist desiring the female body.

"The disciplining mechanisms of misogyny vary from country to country, but one consistent tenet is that a woman’s value is determined by how hard it is to fuck her. I wanted to create a body of work purely for my gratification," Tramontana said. "As a poet, I’m in a submissive position to my desire. As a photographer, I intentionally objectify my male subjects in a power play that excites us both—they like that I am fully clothed while they’re in a state of undress—but I refer to them as my subjects. The process of our shared spontaneous attention in this moment of social media commodification—Simone Weil said, 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity'—is just as vital to me as the portrait."

"Serious Pleasures: Poems of Lust and Longing" is writer (New York Times, Esquire) and photographer Mary Katharine Tramontana’s debut collection of poetry, accompanied by original photography. The collection began as a letter she wrote to seduce an incapacitating on-again, off-again lover—a glamorous and mysterious Milanese neighbor.

Desire can give us energy to change our lives, or it can incapacitate us. It can get us closer to ourselves, or it can obliterate our sense of self. Making art can be a way of doing something with our sexual longing, but at what point does writing on desire become a cyclical self-torture, keeping the suffering that we had set out to assuage alive?

Mary Katharine Tramontana (b. 1982) is a photographer, poet, and writer whose work on sexual politics and art has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Playboy, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and others. She’s collaborated with Reina Sofía, the Spanish Film Archive, WILZIG Museum, silent green, Arsenal Institute, Academy of Arts Berlin, and Technical University Berlin. In the past year, she has exhibited internationally in five shows in Miami, Berlin, and Savannah, and given multiple talks on sexuality, culture, and gender. The recipient of a Frieze arts writing bursary, she has worked as a sex research assistant at Kinsey Institute. This spring she will write her first non-fiction book, LUST: Porn, Power, Pleasure, will be co-written with Erika Lust and published in the US, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Catalonia, and Germany. She lives in Berlin.