Fetish Photography
Three books of fetish photography, each quite
different, offer seductive glimpses into the realms of fetish photography,
fetish fashion and alternative sexuality.
Generation Fetish: Tattooed Love Girls
Lee Higgs's Generation Fetish, a hardback with 330 photographs, is at
$37.95 easily the best value of the books reviewed here. Higgs's publisher,
Goliath, produces swank volumes of erotic photography, including Higgs's
book; Charles Gatewood's Badlands; Peter Gorman's Naked in
Apartment 7; and a new series of amateur photography that I will review
in future columns. Goliath books are nice objects: small (Higgs's book is
5.5" x 7.5"), stocky and satisfyingly heavy. The models, often shot in
extreme close up and semi-dressed in knock-your-eye-out reds, yellows and
blacks, fill the pages to bursting point. The confining effect of the book's
size accentuates the themes of erotic constraint in the images.
Higgs has assembled a group of gothic twenty-to-thirty-something models who
combine radical looks with a strong sense of tribal/generational identity.
The theme of Generation Fetish is that these women represent the
sexual identity of their generation or at least its pierced and tattooed
fringes: a generation that has made a mix of fetish fashion, piercing,
tattooing, bondage, Gothicism, bisexuality and jeux-sans-frontieres
fantasy its characteristic style.
These images offer a dramatic break from old-school soft-core images of
women as man-pleasing Bunnies and lingerie fillers: submissive, idealized,
interchangeable receptacles of male lust. The women imaged in Generation
Fetish make the airbrush-and-hairspray bimbos of Playboy and Victoria's
Secret, with their long tresses, manipulative submissiveness, and
hypocritical, come-hither poses look as over as Hugh Hefner's, ahem, pipe.
The Generation Fetish women take their visual personas to extremes:
heavy lidded tattooed vixens, shaven headed punks, gothic dominas and
ice-cold femmes. In and out of bondage, these women stare fearlessly into
the camera, or ignore the viewer utterly in cool self-contemplation.
The heavily featured cover model is a case in point. Petite and pale as
ivory in her blood-orange vegetable-dyed hair, huge blue-black eyes, and
lemon yellow lips, her tiny body is marked by three asymmetrically placed
tattoos. A large Celtic cross adorns her shaved pubis. Her tattoos indicate
a life beyond the photograph, and her nakedness does not make her the
viewer's possession. Spread on a bare white stone floor drenched in blue
shadows, her full breasts and pierced nipples exposed, her dark-lidded eyes
closed, she is an overpoweringly sensual, yet thoroughly remote and
self-possessed image of 21st Century womanhood.
The camera is never used as a transparent peephole for voyeurs. Rather the
models enter into a dramatic relationship with the camera and the
photographer is a strong, if invisible presence within every scene.
Bondage is represented in many images, but as an adornment and an
enhancement rather than as a means of subjection and degradation. Kenneth
Tynan, the English theatre critic, and a lifelong devotee of bondage and
sado-masochism, remarked that pain is not, as Freud assumed, the masochist's
source of pleasure: it is the unpleasant but necessary side effect of fully
embodying a masochistic fantasy. In Generation Fetish bondage is
presented in the spirit of laying claim to all the possibilities of sexual
identity, rather than of forcing others to submit to neurotic fantasies of
empowerment-through-degradation. The women in the submissive position in
these images are always fully in command of themselves and are obviously
consensual participants in role-playing games, not habitual victims acting
out a lack of self esteem.
This sense of a generation of women liberated enough to play with the
theatrics of fetishism for their own amusement and pleasure is central to
Higgs's vision in Generation Fetish. This is a fetishism that has
fully shaken off the term's negative, Freudian associations and released
itself into the realm of sex-positive diversity.
Higgs appears respectful of the models' identities. His work is not about
capturing and possessing women. Traditionally, fetish models dressed to
embody the (male) fetishist's fantasy, but the women in Generation
Fetish make fetishes of themselves. Their tattoos, piercing and bondage
are part of a process of bodily self-repossession, empowerment and
generational bonding. The adornments are worn and displayed primarily for
themselves and one another, and only secondarily for the viewer. This
combination of bold sexual display and self-ownership makes the women in
Generation Fetish genuinely radical images of desire.
The Beauty of Fetish II: Latex Ice Queens
The Beauty of Fetish II is more austere, more traditionally
"fetishist" than Generation Fetish. Its effect, if not as immediate
and dramatic, is more subtly totemic and psychological. Steve Diet Goedde
reinvents images from the classic fetish repertoire: impossibly high heels,
curves outlined in shiny latex, scooped breasts spilling out of conical
black corsets. There is often a retro feel to the settings, clothes, makeup,
hairstyles and the visual personae of models like Belle, Gina Velour and
Yvette that places fetishism in the context of nostalgia: the attempt to
recapture a lost image of desire. Where Lee Higgs explores fetish as a sign
of social subversion and alternative community, Steve Diet Goedde represents
fetish in psychological terms as the isolated pursuit of a remote and
tantalizing erotic perfection.
The major differences between The Beauty of Fetish and The Beauty
of Fetish II are the inclusion of more color shots and the change of
scenery from Mid-West bleak to LA sleek. The first volume of The Beauty
of Fetish was shot mainly in black and white, and the downbeat urban and
industrial Chicago exteriors increased the retro/noir feel of the
images. Volume II blossoms into color every few pages and the contrast with
the black and white is startling. There is a tendency at first to seek out
the color and pass over the black and white, but as the color's visceral
jolt wears off, the book reveals itself as a study in the contrasting
possibilities of black and white and color.
In the black and white images, Diet Goedde echoes the look of '50's and
'60's glamour photography, often placing the models in unadorned, everyday
domestic settings, by sinks, refrigerators and radiators. These out of
focus, fuzzily familiar settings intensify the sharp, stylized images of the
women and their outfits. The viewer is positioned in relation to a mythical
past and confronted with erotically charged images, a representational
technique that evokes those childhood moments when early libidinal stirrings
focus on a specific object and the image of desire erupts from the
pre-sexual sameness like Venus from the ocean. The black and white pictures
conjure the past but never function simply as pastiche. Contemporary clues
like the snake tattoo that curls around the model Yvette's upper arm,
intrude anachronistically to disturb the nostalgia and temporally disorient
the viewer.
In the color images, the alien splendor of the outfits (a metallic turquoise
latex dress detailed with peacock feathers at the bust) emerges and
accentuates the models' distance from ordinary social reality and
conventional relationships. This effect is heightened by the color, which
allows the otherworldliness of the models' appearances to achieve maximum
intensity.
Domiana turns her blank, perfectly oval, eye-brow-less mask of a face to the
camera, framed in poker straight black hair and slashed by red closed lips.
The whole surface of her eyes is whitened by contact lenses that hide the
irises and leave only tiny black pupils. These dots and the red of her mouth
are the only relief in the snowy emptiness of her face. Her right upper arm
is decorated with a red, gold, green and yellow tattoo depicting waves and a
spiral of fire. Her tiny waist is cinched in a black and red vinyl corset
that blossoms out to enclose full breasts. The exaggerated voluptuousness of
her body clashes with the mask-like face: a combination of android, zombie,
doll and Kabuki mask. Her attention is both seductive and alienating, and
the image manifests, in a moment of dream-like reality suspension, the
charisma and danger of the object of desire.
Fetish Diva Midori sits on a gold patterned sofa, wearing a tight,
full-length emerald green vinyl dress, a shiny black coat, pearls and black
leather gloves. The camera is positioned slightly above and behind her to
the left, so that only her ear, high cheekbone, the curve of an eyebrow and
the fullness of her breasts appear beneath her lustrous, swept-back hair.
Her face is turned away from the viewer, her eyes and mouth hidden. She
withholds her attention, leaving the viewer to admire her back. Her attitude
and the coat and gloves suggest one about to leave. This is an entrancing,
Proustian image of the cold, withholding object of desire arrayed in all the
cruel magnificence that the neglected lover can project on the beloved.
Psychologically complex images like these raise the question of why artists
like Steve Diet Goedde must fight for their legitimate status against a
sex-negative artistic establishment that automatically associates "fetish"
with pornography. If we compare The Beauty of Fetish II to a
collection of erotic "art" photographs like the first of the Graphis series
Nudes, it becomes clear that what constitutes the artistic character
of a great deal of "serious" nude photography is its mimicry of high art
sculptural forms and portrait conventions. Herb Ritts's, Ania Walisiewicz's
and Dennis Manarchy's statuesque male nudes, Ron Norton's gauze-draped
females, Fabrizio Ferri's realist black and white portraits and Francois
Gillet's naturalistic, painterly color shots are all highly derivative of
sculpted and painted nudes in the various stylistic genres of Western art.
It seems odd that this very derivativeness is part of what constitutes these
pictures as "art". Despite the photographers' mastery of technique and their
successful manipulation of aesthetic conventions, none of the images in
Nudes possesses the dark emotional expressiveness and psychological
density of the best of Diet Goedde's work. It is time for Steve Diet Goedde
to be recognized by the major critics as the powerful and original artist
that he is.
Secret Space: The Art of Fetish Photography: Ritual Intimacy
John Gillan's book is the coziest of these interpretations of fetish.
Whereas Diet Goedde's chilly divas and Lee Higgs's community of tattooed
vixens may scare off the average consumer, the majority of Gillan's images
depict attractive, normal-looking models in couples or trios engaged in the
enactment of "erotic ritual". Most of the photographs in Secret Space
were taken with a home made pinhole camera, which gives a dim, candle-lit,
intimate feel to the mainly black and white images.
Gillan uses the term "fetish" in its broadest and most inclusive sense, and
many pictures depict bondage play and mild S/M rather than latex and rubber.
The emphasis is on fetish and kink as shared secrets and intimacy enhancers
for sexually adventurous couples. Gillan uses full nudity in almost all his
pictures, a sure indicator of a more vanilla interpretation of fetish than
will be found in Diet Goedde, for example. Secret Space is about good
looking female and male bodies decorated with corsets and stiletto heels,
leather and rope, in tasteful, comfy looking and nicely lit home-dungeons.
Even when whips, clamps and hot wax are being applied, there is a reassuring
sense of safety and trust in Secret Space. Tenderness, respect and an
almost devotional attitude to the body emanate from these pictures. For
those attracted to the world of fetish but scared by the scene's harder
edges, Gillan's book is a genuinely erotic but gentle introduction.
Generation Fetish
Photographer: Lee Higgs
Goliath
August 2001, 368 pages, $37.95
The Beauty of Fetish Vol II
Photographer: Steve Diet Goedde
Edition Stemmle
August 2001, 136 pages, $59.95
Secret Space: The Art of Fetish Photography
Photographer: John Gillan
Long Wind Publishing
July 2001, 84 pages, $45.00
[Interviews with photographers Steve Diet Goedde and Lee Higgs also
available on PopMatters]
