What happens when you give someone a camera, a backyard, a bag of oranges and complete control over how they want to be seen?
In Citrus Punch, Betty A turns a simple afternoon at home into a playful experiment in erotic self-portraiture. Created for I Shot Myself, the photo series has none of the elaborate machinery of a conventional adult shoot: no large crew, no artificial set and, most importantly, nobody else deciding how the person in front of the camera should look.
Instead, Betty becomes photographer, performer and creative director of her own fantasy.
The result is spontaneous, intimate and slightly mischievous, built around something as ordinary as fruit and transformed by imagination into something unmistakably erotic.
Being Sexy for Yourself Changes the Camera
The most interesting line in Betty’s account isn’t really about fruit. It’s about who the performance was for.
“It felt like I was being sexy for me.”
That small distinction gets to the heart of erotic self-portraiture.
Traditional photography creates a relationship between photographer and subject. Someone looks, someone is looked at, and the person behind the camera inevitably makes decisions about framing, timing, pose and perspective.
Self-portraiture disrupts that relationship. The subject chooses the moment, the angle and the image that ultimately represents them. The gaze doesn’t disappear, but control over it changes hands.
That freedom is something Betty explicitly describes as liberating. She wasn’t simply posing for somebody else’s idea of attractiveness. She was experimenting with her own.
There may also have been some accidental spectators: according to Betty, construction workers were busy on a site a couple of doors down. Whether they noticed her artistic afternoon is another question entirely.
✔ Click the button below to enter I Shot Myself.
✔ Open the Search section.
✔ Type Betty_A to find the full shoot.
What Is I Shot Myself?
Citrus Punch makes considerably more sense once you understand the concept behind I Shot Myself.
Rather than placing the photographer at the centre of erotic image-making, the project was built around self-portraiture. Contributors photograph themselves and decide how they want their bodies and sexuality to appear on camera.
That philosophy makes the project particularly interesting within alternative erotic culture. The photographs can still be exhibitionistic, provocative, funny or deliberately sexual, but the creative process begins with the person appearing in them.
The project belongs to FECK, an Australian independent adult company that has been exploring alternative approaches to erotic production since the early 2000s. Its wider network also includes projects such as Beautiful Agony and I Feel Myself.
FECK describes its approach as ethical erotica based on valuing performers alongside audiences, with contributors receiving payment for their work. That emphasis on participation and control is particularly visible in I Shot Myself, where the performer literally becomes the person creating the image.
Why Citrus Punch Works
Citrus Punch isn’t interesting because somebody discovered that an orange could look suggestive. Humanity figured out the erotic potential of fruit a very long time ago.
What makes the series work is its lack of distance.
There is no attempt to disguise the domestic setting or transform Betty into an unreachable fantasy. The backyard, changing weather and improvised props become part of the experience rather than problems that need to be hidden.
And that gives the images personality.
Alternative erotica is often at its most interesting when it stops trying to reproduce the polished visual language of mainstream adult entertainment and starts asking what happens when people construct their own fantasies instead.
Sometimes that produces elaborate experimental cinema.
Sometimes it produces a woman, a camera and a suspiciously large quantity of oranges.
Both can be art.
