Webcam, an extended series of small detailed pencil drawings, each 15 centimetres wide and 12½ tall, was started around 2010, and as far as we know will extend as Lévy-Lasne finds interesting enough material. In 2012 his friend and colleague Aurélien Bellanger wrote this honest and revealing piece about Webcam:
When streaming arrived at the end of the 2000s, I could access the complete repertoire of sexual preferences. I discovered, experimentally, my type of woman and my favourite situations. I don’t know whether that makes me the typical porn buff, but I do know that as a painter Thomas Lévy-Lasne’s path was diverging from mine. He was becoming a professional. He had files on his computer, and he didn’t like to share them.
It was Thomas who first told me about Cam4. He was clearly in search of something – a few years earlier he had eagerly explored escort sites. He also told me that as a child he would make all humanity parade in front of him, stark naked, and that in middle school he had monopolised the market for dirty magazines. As a student at the Paris Beaux-Arts, he had attentively followed anatomy classes. However, despite an obvious vocation, the nude was not a major component of his work.
Cam4 was a genuine revolution for online porn buffs, a breath of fresh air. Though they had been widely available for over fifteen years, webcams had not yet yielded their maximum erotic potential until then.
As webcam exhibitionism became a fully-fledged genre, we tried to believe it was for us these people undressed. We became unmoored from the real world by virtual sex. Initially, Cam4 was a complete regression. The tiny image was of very poor quality. The full-screen key opened a window inviting us to take a premium subscription, otherwise the image would often freeze. Couples were frozen in endless foreplay, refusing to frolic outside the private room; girls’ t-shirts never lifted enough to display a breast. Cam4 required great patience. Some live shows lasted several hours. The Argentinean girl must have sucked her partner many times: his cock was wet and hard, but she still had her panties on. It was impossible to rewind or fast-forward to moments of grace, only the thrills of anticipation and the disappointments of live action. Used as we were to perfect instants, we caught ourselves enjoying the fleeting sight of a nipple under a translucent sheet.
Thomas hung on much longer than the rest of us. As a regular non-paying visitor, he tried to reach stages reserved to premium visitors. He saw randomly granted penetrations. He saw the man who held his wife by the neck like a tall glass of water so that her mouth would quench his thirst, and the one who got his thumb bitten as though it could make him come. He saw the man who dove between a wife’s open thighs as though he was jumping into the void in a fall that would never end. He saw the man and the woman who tried to hold their awkward position as long as possible. He saw a girl staring absentmindedly into the camera while her nipple was sucked, as though her erogenous zones were several thousand kilometres away.
Thomas saw all this and grabbed it: Command-Shift-3. Hundreds of hours and thousands of images. In this way, he managed to recompose a world as varied as in the major porn-streaming sites. He stole something from time, then gave it back in spades by drawing what he had taken. Slowly, in all their details, fragments of code became images. Images, not snapshots. He had to reproduce each lozenge of the fishnet bodysuit, each line of the zebra print. He had to shade skins with wide strokes for shadows and small strokes for private parts – if wide hatching could render the curve of a newly-freed breast, nipples required more elaborate work. The pencil strokes are even more delicate when he renders the translucent silk panties of the girl with her back turned to show us her buttocks.
No one posed for Thomas Lévy-Lasne, and I’d like to believe that he didn’t use the chat function to ask for special positions. No one posed, because time created the compositions for him.