Surreal Photos of Small-Town American Swingers in the 2000s

In the early 2000s, Naomi Harris—then a novice just starting out in documentary photography—went on a wild journey through the sex party scene of small-town America. The resulting 2008 book, America Swings, is perhaps the greatest documentary project you’ve never heard of.

Yet in many ways, Harris only discovered the scene by accident. She was living in Miami Beach, working on her first major project: capturing the last generation of South Miami Beach’s senior citizens. (Twenty years later, this project became her book Haddon Hall.) In her downtime, she’d visit Haulover Beach, a plot of shoreline set aside for local nudists. Gradually, she noticed a cast of regulars at Haulover, particularly at weekends, who seemed to be good friends with one another. They’d even throw beach parties and meet up for potlucks on the holidays.

“It was a real community atmosphere,” Harris says. “I basically connected myself with those people. Partially because they were funny and nice but mainly for safety, as I was 24 years old and had caught some pervert filming me. I’m probably on some weird fetish site out there.”

The Haulover Beach set would always be talking about parties: ones to which they’d been, ones to which they were planning to go.

“I'm like, ‘Why the fuck are people always going to all these parties and never inviting me?’” Harris says. The penny didn’t fully drop until a man named Ron asked her to accompany him as his “key”—single men weren’t allowed to the parties, so he needed a female partner to unlock the door. “I'm like, ‘OK, sure. I'll do anything once,’” Harris says.

That first party took place at a club in Fort Lauderdale called Trapeze, which was really a set of offices at the end of an industrial strip mall MacGyvered together. There were ten or so mattresses in the group sex room, none of which matched. There was a Chef Boyardee-looking fellow cooking up a storm (slicing roast beef at the meat carving station), and crowds of “people you would have been in line behind at the supermarket earlier that day or at the bank, just normal-looking people, loading their plates,” Harris says.

After about 20 minutes of dancing, people retreated to the locker room to undress and enter the back rooms. Harris got naked, too, because she had just eaten a ton of meat and potatoes. “It was like popcorn ceilings with fluorescent light. It was an office! I'm just like, ‘This is fucked up.’ When we went back into the [group sex] room later on, Ron nudges me and is like, ‘It's pretty hot, right?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, super sexy,’” Harris says jokingly.

“I’m looking around, and I’m like, ‘This is the least sexy thing I've ever seen in my life.’ We left at 3AM, and as we were leaving, a woman in nothing but heels was getting a prune Danish from the breakfast bar area. I'm like, ‘No one is going to believe me, I have to photograph this.’”

That was the first swingers event she’d been to, but many more would follow. The first party she photographed was Swingstock, “a four-day camping fornication festival” held in Wisconsin. “Five hundred swingers, all camping, kind of like Burning Man in a sense, except in the woods, not the desert,” Harris says. 

“Everyone is having a good time. I didn’t want the pictures to be sexy—that's what erotic photography is about. This is documentary photography,” Harris says, who by then was compiling shots for America Swings.

“I didn’t want the pictures to be sexy—that's what erotic photography is about. This is documentary photography.”

“So there's one picture in the book, I call it ‘Swing in the Forest with Toothbrush,’ and there's a woman in a swing that's getting like manually, you know, whatever. You don't see what's happening because the guy’s back is covering, but there's a row of people watching, and one of the women is brushing her teeth. And to me, that's just funny. First of all, doing stuff outdoors that’s normally done indoors is funny anyway because it's out of place. But having someone in a sex swing and someone's cleaning their teeth while watching is just funny. And that's kind of the bulk of the book. There are all these funny scenarios,” Harris says.

“And that's the thing, swingers, they take sex very seriously because that's kind of their pastime. But at the same time, it’s like summer camp. They all have a great time. At every swinger party you go to, there's a contest or some kind of component of doing something silly and funny. Maybe at some clubs, it's just ‘let's get down to business,’ but it's not like you see in the movies. There are often themes, like it’s Christmas time, or Halloween. And they do theme parties like leather and lace. And like, for the most part, the sex is almost like an afterthought. It's really a sense of community.”

Part of what drove Harris was that she’d never seen anyone photograph the swinger community in a documentary style before. “It's a hard community to get yourself infiltrated with,” Harris says. “So I spent almost five years. Swingstock, the first party I photographed was the summer of 2003, and it snowballed from there.

“It was very different then, there were no apps. I had to do a lot of web research. If you were to look at my browser history, it was crazy. A lot of time was spent researching because I really wanted a cross-section of America, and very specifically, I wasn’t interested in big cities. I didn’t photograph in New York City. I didn’t photograph in Los Angeles. I wanted to photograph in suburbia and small towns. Because to me, that was more real—like, you expect people to engage in group sex in a big city, it's just what you do, I guess, I don’t know. In small rural areas, that’s more interesting.”

The book was a hustle, one Harris paid for entirely out of her own pocket. Only two of the 40 parties in Harris’ book are from magazine commissions. Another was an idea she presented to a writer: They wanted to cover the Mandingos they met at a party in New Orleans, “amply-sized” black men who consensually have sex with white women in front of their husbands—but the publication ultimately went with a different photographer on the shoot. “They put a really well-known photographer on it, someone who used a 4x5 camera and had never photographed this subject matter before,” Harris says. 

“And it's like, ‘Fuck you. This is my story.’ So I showed up at the party because I'm like, ‘I'm photographing it for my book, I don't care if it's in a magazine or not, this is for my book.’ When I photographed, if it was a theme party, I would wear whatever the theme was. But if you're not wearing any clothes, where do you put your film? So I always wore a tool belt. I would be in sneakers, tube socks, a tool belt, and nothing else. And so I turned up at the party, and that was what I was wearing. And she was in jeans and a turtleneck. So the response was very different. All the people knew who I was—I had a reputation,” Harris says.

“If you're not wearing any clothes, where do you put your film? So I always wore a tool belt.”

The writer was pissed. He sent a furious email saying he’d blacklist her. “Well, he didn't blackball me, but the project itself really kind of screwed up my career for a while because a lot of people didn't want to work with me when the book came out. Rather than seeing, ‘Oh, here's a woman who's capable of getting into really tough situations and ingratiating herself, like, isn't that amazing? Let’s send Naomi to this.’ They were like, ‘Ooh, she's a swinger, she's perverted.’ Especially with advertising, all work stopped. In fact I was on location about to photograph for a big sneaker company and a couple of hours before the shoot I got the call to pack up and go home. No explanation, just that they had seen my website and didn’t want me photographing for them.”

Harris wanted the book to be a huge cultural event, but it didn’t blow like she’d hoped it would. “There is that one picture that goes viral every year. It's the Super Bowl swinger picture [because what’s more American than football, blowjobs, and beer], and I never get any credit. Share the photo, just credit photographers!” she says. “I think it came out too early. I think the world wasn't ready for America Swings, and we are now, maybe.

“I wanted to get on Oprah. I wanted to be like Tom Cruise and jump on the sofa and Oprah to be like ‘Ey!’ You know, I wanted this book to be a phenomenon of its own.” 

The huge reason why you may have not seen these shots before is that the universe quite simply conspired to fuck up Harris’ plans in a major way. “The day this fancy, limited edition Taschen book with a foreword by Richard Prince came out was the same day of the Lehman Brothers collapse, the start of the subprime mortgage crisis, essentially, the start of the recession. So I had exhibitions in New York and LA that I dropped a ton of money to print. Never got any money back. It was a disaster. The art world stalled for a bit. Because, you know, who cares about art when you're losing on your stocks and bonds and everything, literally blowing your financial wad? So that's my luck,” Harris says.

“I spent so much money, I traveled all over America because I had to stay in hotels. I photographed in 38 states. So this was a big undertaking. And no, it was not funded, I didn't have grant money. I was stupid. I put it all on my credit card. Thankfully, I paid it off since then, but in 2008, I was like $26,000 in the hole for this.”

There are a few different scenes with the Mandingos in Harris’s book. The leader of the Florida Mandingos, Art Hammer, wanted to provide Harris with an “airtight” scene for her to photograph (use your imagination). They found a white woman (and husband) who were down, but one of the Mandingos was so well endowed that the woman balked at the idea of letting him have sex with her. 

“I never did get my airtight, but at one point, one of the guys was, you know, in her mouth. And then when he comes, he came all over her face, and there’s this picture in the book. She's rubbing it on her face, and it definitely got in her eye. And it’s painful when that gets in your eye,” Harris says. 

“And her husband's like, ‘Come to the bathroom, come to the bathroom.’ I'm like, ‘Oh, he's going to clean her up. He knows it's burning her eye. He cares about her.’ And he takes her to the bathroom. And one of the guys is walking out of the bathroom, and he’s like, ‘Argh! The guy’s licking her face!’”

Harris began making a documentary on Art Hammer and the Mandingos. VICE actually scooped her, but Harris would have done things differently. “The story I would have done would have been much more about, like, why are you fucking these white women? Not like, ‘Yeah it’s fun, whatever.’ Like, what happened to you growing up during segregation, when you weren’t allowed to go to school and drink from water fountains? Why did that make you want to fuck white women? Because you're literally fucking the man through the ma'am. I think that would have made a far more interesting documentary. But, c'est la vie.”

America Swings shows the real humdrum nature of the swinger lifestyle, and how fundamentally silly and not all that important sex becomes when you make it your whole thing. As Harris says, it’s about community first and foremost. I hope her work and this book get the attention they deserve. 

“The bottom line is, to me, if I eat and live off of my work, that's being successful. I’ll most likely be well-known when I’m 80, or dead, that’s the way it is for female artists. I want to continue to make work and I want my work to be more than just seen on Instagram. I want people to hang it in their houses. And give me new assignments—I haven’t worked that much the past five or so years because I was caregiving for my parents. I need to get back into it. I’m also exploring pottery. Currently, I’m making sculptures based on the seniors I photographed at Haddon Hall. Who knows, maybe I’ll make a series of swinger ceramics next!”`

@nichet