The premature passing of pornography’s preeminent portraitist has left a hole in the culture which gapes to this day. Yet the death at 53 of Richard Avery, California’s renowned visionary of voyeurism, leaves also a void shrouded in mystery, as befits a man with the signature quip: “Never clean up a mess — ever.”
Eulogized by Fleshbot as an “incorrigible thrill seeker,” it was Santa Cruz-born Richard Avery who finally turned the page on both classic ‘natural’ porn and its long, plastique aftermath. It was Dick, to a significant degree, who, early in the new millenium, thrust the skin game into the borderline-personality-disorder aesthetic of Sasha Grey, Suicide Girls, and so many other early 21st Century luminaries of the lewd.
Only in a relative blink of an eye — perhaps not too long before his 2023 death — has the zeitgeist truly shifted from Dick’s masterful rendering of women as luridly unstable to today’s muscle-butted, funny-filtered marketplace of the masses. Yet Dick, as it happens, even had a hand in that.
It was through scores of trailblazing proto-podcasts and blogs he facilitated on the side — informative shows such as PornStarLifeCoach and HookerLifeCoach — that Dick did so much to midwife today’s uber-smut era in which every 18+-year-old woman with a phone and CashApp can make bank.
Part of Dick’s legacy is redefining not only how we look at naked women, but how many women take showing their wares to a professional level.
With towards a million and a half American women reportedly having OnlyFans accounts, and content creators such as Sophie Rain saying she made $43 million in a year on O.F. — even before turning 21 — Richard Avery appears in retrospect to have been at the vanguard of the pornotariat.
So that’s some of what he did. But who was the man himself?
Mere months after his death, I make a pilgrimage to Avery’s left-as-it-was home studio in Beverly Hills.
While waiting to be admitted, out front I run into Bobbi Starr, a classically trained concert oboist whose accolades once she turned to less sublimated forms of entertainment include back-to-back Superslut awards from the X-Rated Critics Association and a Best Double Penetration gong from the Adult Video Network. After small talk with her about the hygienic qualities of microfiber-covered furniture, I am ushered in.
What most strikes me inside, apart from the multitudinous onslaught of uniformly framed Avery prints of women in carnal disarray — Angela White, Tori Black, Skylar Snow, Ruby Luster, Alektra Blue, Jade Vixen, Sophia Jade, Jada Stevens, Charlotte Sartre, Skin Diamond, Aiden Ashley, Ash Hollywood, London Keyes, and so many other bedroom names exhibited — is the mesmerizing sterility of the abode.
Francis Bacon this man was not. When describing his laboratory of the lewd, pristine would be an understatement. It is immaculate. His upstairs bedroom looks more like a Nordic furniture showroom than where a man, an American, a pornographer, anyone at all, had slept.
I see no personal effects beyond rows of photography books so uncreased, so unsoiled, that I glance around for accompanying white cotton gloves. And large-screen Apple computers positioned at perfectly ergonomic desks utterly devoid of clutter.
This nightmare of bland exactitude was the secret lair of a man who did all night hotel-room shoots while champagne and 8 balls vanished into, and onto, pagan queens, even rolling with a more intimate coterie through long, tidal bathtub-make-outs before surfacing, a porno-Poseidon wielding a camera in place of trident.
This was the secret lair of a man celebrated as a libertine fiend. As an online remembrance by Avery’s sometime intern, Chad Gates, notes: “Richard worked hard and played even harder. He always said he would die young and he always followed through on everything he said.”
Yet there were hints in interviews of an inner severity. When asked in 2006 if he liked black and white or color more, he replied: “I prefer black and white, but I understand that audiences need to see colors, such as pink.”
So, looking around in bewilderment, it dawns that this was Bluebeard’s chamber, but in a Bizzaro world where the precisely rendered display of plundered bodies and carnal madness is all out for the world to see (“never clean up a mess — ever”) while here, behind a locked door in Beverly Hills, is the shocking truth.
Richard ‘Dick’ Avery was truly the man who wasn’t there.
Like for real. No joke. His surviving alter ego is eminent commercial and music photographer Chris Cuffaro, 65, who walks me back down from the bedroom.
All along Avery was Cuffaro, a member of George Michael’s entourage for the Faith tour, hob-nobber with Elton John, chronicler of pre-fame Soundgarden and peak Michael Hutchence, video-shooter for Pearl Jam, and maker of countless hyper-glossily exuberant marketing images for the likes of Disney, Nickelodeon, Fox, and others.
It was Cuffaro, a consummate professional of the clean end of town, who conjured up Avery, then blazed the wild aforementioned trail as a genius of sleaze for years and years, before disseminating news of Avery’s death via backchannels in October, 2023.
Cuffaro had decided it was time to get out from the shadow of Dick.
As it happens, photographing women in the raw has been a vocation since early adolescence, but “you have to balance art and commerce,” Cuffaro says. While porn was “for my soul,” paying the bills came via shooting for fun, shiny, hyper-colorful, happy posters promoting TV shows including Glee, American Idol, and So You Think You Can Dance.
Cuffaro is as much a master of the day as Avery was of the night.
The split was initially necessary so the normie work wouldn’t be imperilled, says Cuffaro. “If I started turning around telling people I’m shooting naked girls doing nasty things, that’s gonna fuck up everything. My agent would kill me, and Nickelodeon would be like ‘What the fuck?” And so would Disney,” Chris says.
“My answer to everything always is that if David Bowie can create Ziggy Stardust, then Chris Cuffaro can do Richard Avery. And it’s not me. Chris Cafaro would never do that — that’s disgusting. But Richard Avery would: he would shoot that, and he would have fun doing it.”
The early years of the new millennium was when the internet really started gutting revenues of traditional media, which further motivated Chris to get into sex work. “Television was budgets,” he says. “And everything was shrinking, money wise. It was nice when you got paid $20,000 to do a shoot. Next thing you know, American Idol’s coming at you going, ‘Hey, can you do it for half as much?'” And you’re like, wait a minute, you guys are American Idol. What are you cutting rates for?”
So then was spawned Avery, who, with porn actress turned entrepreneur Juli Ashton ran Juliland, an online porniverse which hosted not only pics and vids but a motherload of lifestyle and industry discussions, advice, and podcasts including the aforementioned PornStarLifeCoach and HookerLifeCoach. Discussions and how-to’s covered everything from financial management to “great anal foods.”
“You guys gross me out,” says Avery to his co-hosts on one of the podcasts, not unapprovingly.
Downstairs, the high-end pornucopia is accompanied by dozens and dozens and dozens of framed rock-star prints by Cuffaro. Leaning in thick groupings against walls are shots of George Michael in Elvis mode; Chris Cornell squatting in the snap later adorning the cover of Corbin Reiff’s definitive biography, Total Fucking Godhead; Fiona Apple with her big, heart-sick soul; Perry Farrell strutting on the last of his fumes.
As I probe Chris about photography, his meticulous eye and supreme technical command, his zeal, his morbidness, his decisiveness, a certain taste for depravity, his handle on light and position, he pulls from a shelf a series of books we flick through. “This guy, [Nobuyoshi] Araki, is literally the Helmut Newton of Japan,” Chris says. “There’s nobody better. I have a lot of Araki books. He documents the sex culture and the life of Japan — the sex clubs and the hookers. I got into shibari [a type of bondage] because of him.”
“I got sick of seeing that,” I say.
“I know,” shoots back Cuffaro. “Now it’s gotten stupid. Like everybody’s all ‘shibari”! but I’m like ‘Been-there-done-that-bitch.’ Bobbi Starr, who you met before, can tie you up if you want to.”
“Really not — ”
“She started Electro Sluts, which was a domination site tying girls up and using electric shock to fuck with them. She did all that stuff. She’s done everything. We laugh about it now. Oh,” he says, switching books. “Here’s Tony Ward — what I like about Tony is I’m a big grain fan. He sold me on that. Look at my work: all my digital work has grain in it. I hate shit that looks like digital. Nowadays everybody tries to be perfect — sharp, crisp, perfect: a hundred megapixels — and I’m like nuh-uh.”
Chris speeds up, accelerating through a story of how in his later teen years of living on 19th Street in San Jose most of his friends were Japanese and he’d play basketball with them at a Buddhist temple on 5th Street where he met a monk working in the temple garden who told him about Japan’s wabi-sabi aesthetic.
“The perfection of imperfection,” says Chris. “I don’t want things to be perfect. It’s like in music, do you want every note to be perfect? No! I don’t care about perfection. I want soul,” he says, slotting Tony Ward back in. “So I would shoot pictures back when I was doing Avery and it would be girls stretched out, and behind them you might see the light stand and an extension cord running across the floor, and people would be like, ‘Dude, there’s a light stand and–” and I’d go, ‘If you’re looking at the light stand and not her then you’re a fucking idiot.'”
Avery could be abrasive, Chris says, but it was backed by talent. “He was better than me,” says Cuffaro. “The greatest photographer of his generation. Although he really was arrogant. I remember interviews he gave where he would be asked, ‘How do you see yourself in relation to Helmut Newton? Or Mapplethorpe?’ And Avery would reply, ‘Who?'”
He tidies the shelf and glances at a wall of smut. “The lens I use for Avery is a wide angle lens,” he says. “I don’t use that lens as Chris Cuffaro. That’s the Dick lens. We don’t touch that lens. But now he’s dead…”.
Cuffaro stoops to withdraw not another published book, but a photo album. “My grandfather was a police detective in the ’40s,” he says, opening to a brunette in a floral-patterned skirt, chunky shoes, chunky legs, and a dark sweater, arms by her side, hanging face-into the wood siding of a house, a rope stretched from her neck to a pillar between upper story windows where the glass reflects the leaves of the high spreading trees of the yard. He turns the pages through a cadaver’s savaged breast, blood sprays, and all manner of precisely-recorded termination.
“When I was five years old he would show me these and tell me how he solved the crime,” says Cuffaro. “This is where it all comes from. It really does. It does come from this. Aren’t these gorgeous? Look at this” he says. “Keeps his sunglasses on while he got it in the head.”
“Decomposed,” says Cuffaro, adjusting the angle at which he holds the album. “Great composition on that dead body.”
“Your grandfather showed you this stuff?”
Chris nods. “At age five. My first exposure to photography was dead people.”
“After high school I got a job at a color lab called Superior Color,” he continues. “The owner was a second distant relative on the Italian side of my family. He was connected with the San Jose police department as well. The police always had to take their vacation the same two weeks. Every year. During those two weeks if something had to be shot, Frank [the owner] would bring me along, and I would do this stuff.”
Chris was 18 or 19 at this time, already “shooting models on the weekend.”
“And what makes a good crime scene shot — compositionally? Were the police photographers just getting what they were told to get or did they have a talent?”
“Well,” says Chris, slowing down. “When you’re doing that kind of photography you gotta make sure you cover everything. Because they’re looking for evidence. I remember the first few times I went. Somebody was dead and Frank would go, ‘Here’s the camera, I want you to shoot the scene.’ And I would do it. He’d watch me and then he’d go, ‘Did you cover everything?’ I’d go, ‘I think I did.’ But he’d go, ‘You know what? You missed. You need to come around this side of it. Move your ass. Come around this side.’ So it was always about: am I capturing everything that they might need for evidence.”
Cuffaro abandoned forensic photography in the summer of 1981 after a woman was shot to death right in front of him by her husband. They were part of a neighboring family and it happened in front of Chris’s house, with the young woman bleeding out as her mother screamed and screamed. When the police arrived it was, given how many of Cuffaro’s family served with the San Jose police, “like a family reunion.”
The next year he moved to L.A., gradually severing ties with his kin.
“Chris is the most interesting man I’ve ever met,” says pornstar Ash Hollywood over brunch at the, considering our conversation, ironically named Alter Ego in Phoenix, Arizona.
“How did you meet him?
“I met Richard first,” says Ash, explaining that she’d been invited to an Avery shoot, which “was so fun compared to anything else I had previously done — because it was so lax. All the other shoots I had done were either mechanical or borderline, like skeezy. But after I got to be introduced to Richard he showed me hours and hours of photos, and then we sat up all night shooting, drinking champagne, getting silly, and shooting set after set after set. He had this amazing way of making it a party, but making it relaxed. Was he egotistical? Yes, 100 per cent, because he knew his talent.”
They’d shoot into the night in hotels around Sunset Boulevard, never too far from Dick’s studio.
“Not where Chris lives now?”
“No, he moved later,” says Ash, letting a waiter check on us and then pressing on. “But last year I went to his Beverly Hills place. I walked in and was baffled at how similar it was. Same layout, maybe just mirrored. I was like, ‘How in this whole city did you find your same place in a different location?’ I had deja vu. It was crazy.”
Ever see him in a relationship, I ask.
“Richard? No. Richard’s a player. Richard will not be tied down. But I’ve definitely seen Chris fall in love.” Ash pauses, shifts a little in her seat. “The hard part for me,” she says, “is when I was younger I loved Richard. I loved his ego. And then I fell head over heels for Chris.”
“And?”
“And then Chris didn’t want anything to do with me because I was just young and dumb.”
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