The story behind this photo of Stormy Daniels as the Virgin Mary

TIME
By Susanna Schrobsdorff

Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, as the Virgin Mary during a 2002 photo shoot. Nika Nesgoda

Sixteen years ago, artist Nika Nesgoda made a series of Cibachrome photographs, in which — taking a page from Caravaggio — she recreated iconic paintings of the Virgin Mary using adult film actors as models. Back then, Nesgoda’s printer refused to make prints of her Virgin Mary photographs. We can maybe forgive the printer’s prudishness. This was long before a site called Pornhub had 28.5 billion visits a year, and before we talked about Game of Thrones sex scenes over dinner, and certainly before we had a President admitting on Twitter to paying hush money to a porn star just before commemorating the National Day of Prayer in the Rose Garden (where he said, rather hopefully: “America is a nation of believers, right?”).[More]

Left: Annibale Carracci, Pietà, 1599–1600 (Alinari Archives/Corbis/Getty Images); Right: Nika Nesgoda, Pietà, 2002