Intro
Psychoanalyst by day, photographer by the way
Statement
Drive, Desire and the Phallus: My photographic work explores psychoanalytic structures, particularly the tension between drive and desire, and the status of the phallus as a signifier. In Lacanian theory, desire is the desire of the Other—it is always mediated, structured by language, and constitutively lacking. Drive, by contrast, is repetitive, partial, and excessive; it circles around the lost object (objet petit a), producing jouissance, not satisfaction. Whereas desire aims at an object it can never attain, drive returns again and again to the site of loss. Force, in this schema, aligns with desire: it is fleeting, impulsive, propulsive—an effect of lack. Power, however, aligns more closely with drive: enduring, constant, and structural. Desire devours drive, but cannot assimilate it. Drive persists in the real, undigested by symbolic appetite. The phallus in Lacanian theory is not the penis, nor reducible to any organ. It is a signifier—specifically, the signifier of the Other’s desire. It occupies a place of structural privilege, indicating the position from which the subject imagines the Other to be desiring them. While the penis may stand in for the phallus (as a fetish object, an index of virility, or a surrogate symbol), the phallus is a symbolic function—it can be had by anyone, regardless of sex. Women can have the phallus (as position), just as men can be castrated despite anatomical possession. My images depict the play and misrecognition between these registers. I photograph the moment where the phallus is both embodied and undone—where a symbolic position collapses into flesh, and where orgasm, the apotheosis of phallic power, renders the subject not sovereign but spent. In this moment, the phallus loses its force and reveals itself as object, and the subject is returned to the real, to jouissance, to the body. What I show is not simply nudity or eroticism, but the trembling split between representation and the real, between symbol and drive. My lens captures the moment where desire gazes—and drive gazes back.
People: The people who have modelled for me form a small but diverse group. My immediate family were my first models, then I reached out to include some of my friends and a few of their friends. Their presence makes possible an encounter not simply with the image, but with the structuring absence at its heart—the gaze. These photographs are not inert documents of a past era to be catalogued and archived; rather, they mark a moment of desire, of looking and being looked at, which is always in excess of the moment itself. What the viewer brings—history, fantasy, lack—is not supplementary, but constitutive. The subject of the image and the subject of the gaze are caught in a shared circuit, each incomplete, each implicated. In this way, the photograph is not merely remembered; it is re-activated. The event is not past—it is suspended, returned to, made present through the desiring gaze of the Other.
Traditional (1986–present): An ongoing pleasure since school days. My work explores the perilous edge where vanity is not simply sublimated, but transfigured into shame—where the gaze of the Other punctures the veil of imagined wholeness. Between this Scylla and Charybdis, what das Man calls “the self” is unmasked as no more than an ever-displaced locus of desire, lack, and misrecognition. I favour traditional headshots in which the subject meets the viewer’s gaze. Eye contact is not incidental—it is structural. For a portrait is never merely a mirror; it stages the dialectic of looking and being looked at. In this, it approaches the function of the icon: not a representation, but a site of encounter. The viewer finds themselves addressed, interpolated—drawn not toward presence, but toward the absent centre that constitutes subjectivity itself.
Erotic (1992–1995): Marked with an adult content warning (NSFW). I cast my subjects in uncanny, Kafkaesque tableaux—staged within morally ambivalent, often banal settings that evoke the Real beneath the everyday. Some images suspend the subject in a gesture or act, caught unawares in a pose that exceeds intention. Others stage a direct look into the camera—not to reveal interiority, but to constitute the viewer as the object of the gaze. In Lacanian terms, the gaze does not belong to the subject depicted, but emerges from the picture itself: from a fold in the scene, a gesture, a limb, an opening. Where the face is absent, the desiring body assumes its symbolic function, and becomes the site from which the gaze emanates. These images do not flatter or invite in the narcissistic sense; they interpellate. The viewer is caught not in voyeurism, but in the unsettling awareness that the image looks back—and in doing so, touches something in the viewer that was not previously known.
Objects & Scenes: (1996–present): A jouissance that traverses continents and fantasy! My work orbits the structures that frame the subject’s desire—not through object relations, but through the architectures of lack. I am drawn to buildings, landscapes, and surfaces as sites where the objet petit a—the elusive cause of desire—may flicker into view. I follow not intuition but the logic of the gaze—that which structures the image from the place of the Other. A place or object becomes a space when it offers the illusion of openness, of symbolic play, of becoming. It becomes an edge when it confronts the subject with resistance: the return of the real, the impossibility of full inscription. I am especially attuned to liminal or obscure aspects of structures—details that do not serve function or narrative, but dislocate vision. These moments may suspend the viewer at the point where their looking is returned to them, reconfiguring the field of desire. If there is an Archimedean point, it is not one of stability but of pivot—where the subject is shifted, not grounded.
Biography
Nora Geist was born in Udine, Italy and moved to London, England at the age of five. The youngest child of a British military strategist, she grew up across several countries. She graduated from the H-Farm International School in Treviso, Italy, where she defiantly came out as a lesbian at 16. A year later, she received her first camera—a Pentax ME Super—and began photographing friends and family in creative portraits and tableaux. After earning a degree in psychology from the University of Paris 8, she trained as a psychoanalyst with the Associazione Italiana di Psicoanalisi, later completing a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis in Paris before a fellowship at the New School for Social Research in New York. After a decade practicing as a psychoanalyst in New York, Nora returned to Europe. Her early work (1986–1995) features portraits and erotic scenes where subjects exuberantly inhabit a thriving “erotisphere.” Later compositions (1996–present) expanded into traditional portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, collages, and still lifes. Across this evolution, her work has retained a distinctly British sensibility—ironic clarity and narrative restraint paired with unflinching intimacy, making even her most provocative images feel quietly, hauntingly precise. Now retired from clinical practice, Nora consults in behavioural psychotherapy. She has been with her partner, Alessandra, for twenty years and married for five. Their two children have completed university and entered the workforce.
Resume / CV
OK Harris Gallery 1997
The Alternative Museum 1999
Exit Art 2001
Piccadilly Gallery 2004
Seattle Erotic Art Show 2010
ARTundressed 2017
Rochester (New York, USA) Erotic Art Festival 2018
Erotic & Bizarre Art Film Festival 2018
Tag! Queer Shorts Festival 2019
The Lift-Off Sessions 2019
BIDEODROMO 2019
Planet 9 Film & Art Festival 2019
Kino London Film Festival 2020
Triple SSS (Sensual, Sexual, Smut Erotic Art Exhibit) 2020
Motion for Pictures 2020
New Dreams International Film Festival 2020
Gorst Underground! 2020
6ix Screams International Film Festival 2020 (Best Experimental)
AltFF Alternative Film Festival 2020
Couch Film Festival 2020
Roxie Roz Burlesque 2021
OGA (S)EXHIBITIONS 2020/2021
New York Nil Gallery 2021
Strandlines LGBTQ+ History Month—February 2021 (www.strandlines.london)
Filmoptico International Art Visual and Film Festival 2021
Gravedigger Dave's Anthology Festival 2021
Caligari. Festival Internacional de Cine de Terror 2021
Horror Lust Film Festival 2021
Hallucinea Film Festival 2021
Guttercast Film Festival 2021
Fear in the Fens Film Festival 2021
Serbest International Film Festival 2021
Indie Movies Spark Film Festival 2021
Pure Magic International Film Festival 2021
Horror Unleashed Film Festival 2021
Bleedingham Horror Film Festival 2021
Bad Film Fest 2021
Horror Unleashed Film Festival 2022
Bizarrya Short Film Festival 2023
Eros and Thanatos Film Festival 2023
Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions — hosted by Lift-Off Global Network 2023
EUPHORIA Short Film Festival 2023
You Are the Judge Web 3 International Film Festival 2023
Junk Food Film Festival 2024
Kalakari Film Festival 2025
18 USC section 2257
All photos were posed by professional models except as otherwise noted. All nude models were 18 years of age or older at the time of the shoot. Neither said photos nor the words used to describe them are meant to represent the models’ actual conduct, statements, identities or personalities. Any similarity between the characters portrayed by the models and actual individuals living or dead is purely coincidental.
All photographs displayed on this website in the galleries marked with advisory warnings for containing adult content are exempt from 18 USC Section 2257 and 28 CFR Part 75 because said visual depictions were created prior to 3 July 1995.
