Alessio Maximilian Schroder is a 29 year-old Italian photographer. From 2004 to 2009, Alessio moved to Vienna, Austria where he studied photography at the Fotoschule Wien. He then moved to Belgrade, Serbia to work on a project about an ambitious urbanization plan that was being carried out in ex-Yugoslavia.

When he returned to Vienna in 2010, Alessio realized he had never really worked in the city. He decided to explore the Austrian society in relationship to sex. “I was convinced that the communication schemes in Vienna and the Germanic culture in general could be and should be defined through an examination of their sexuality – tastes, tendencies, orientations and above all, sexual scenarios“. With this in mind, Alessio finally chose to get in touch with Vienna’s prostitutes: by taking their portraits – portraits of their bodies, more precisely – he is really photographing their clients and their sexual preferences.

Alessio’s project is called Pòrne, an ancient Greek term that means prostitute. He worked on this series for about three years and half, looking up the prostitutes on the web, calling them on the phone to explain his project, and finally visiting those who accepted to participate. “Most of them were disappointed, they expected more elaborate shootings. I took no more than 15-20 photos each and used no external lights. I wasn’t interested in particular poses, I just asked them to look in the camera for a few minutes, in a certain place which I chose“.

Alessio is currently working in Kolkata, India for a series which focuses on the third gender.