Behind the Scenes: Portrait Photography with Barcelona’s Feminist Filmmaker

My photography assignment with Erika Lust offered a fascinating glimpse into an unconventional creative business. Lust runs a feminist pornography company that produces erotic films specifically designed to appeal to female audiences—a progressive approach in an industry traditionally dominated by male perspectives. This portrait session provided an opportunity to document a professional working at the intersection of art, entertainment, and social commentary.

Upon arriving at her Poblenou headquarters, I was immediately struck by the scale of the operation and the substantial team employed there. The professional office environment contradicted common stereotypes about the adult film industry, revealing instead a structured creative business with dedicated departments handling various aspects of production, marketing, and distribution.

Poblenou itself provides a compelling backdrop for portrait photography, with its distinctive blend of Barcelona’s traditional architecture, repurposed industrial warehouses popular with the artistic community, and aggressive new construction. This neighborhood exemplifies the tension between preservation and development as the city government pursues modernization, sometimes at the expense of established communities in its quest to maintain Barcelona’s reputation as a cutting-edge urban center.

The district’s transformation mirrors similar changes in post-industrial neighborhoods worldwide, where former manufacturing zones become creative hubs before eventually facing gentrification pressures. This evolution creates visually rich environments for environmental portraiture, offering photographers diverse architectural elements and urban textures within compact areas.

On the day of our scheduled session, rainy conditions and overcast skies created a distinctly moody atmosphere throughout the neighborhood. While potentially challenging for some photography styles, this weather actually enhanced the location’s character, suggesting excellent potential for dramatic black-and-white photography that would capture Poblenou’s gritty industrial heritage.

The atmospheric conditions made such an impression that I noted the location for future dedicated photography sessions, potentially as a destination for my Barcelona Raw photography group. This demonstrates how portrait assignments often yield unexpected location discoveries that benefit photographers’ broader creative work.

This session highlights how portrait photography extends beyond simply documenting individuals to capturing the environments and contexts that shape their work. By photographing creative professionals in their authentic workspaces, photographers can tell more complete visual stories about contemporary creative industries and the urban environments that foster them.