Fetish Dayz Reviews

AMERICAN GOTHIC

CARLOS BATTS
Scapegoat Publishing, Baltimore ***

After his takes on fetish imagery in Wild Skin and on Tinseltown trash-erotica in Crazy Sexy Hollywood, you might expect Carlos Batts’ third book to be a further exploration of kink and sleaze.

In fact, American Gothic (left) is a complete departure from that style. Although, to judge from his earlier experimental film-making, examples of which can be found on Batts’ simultaneously released DVD (also titled American Gothic and available from Cult Epics), it is closer to his true creative vision — which is somewhere to the south of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The book’s mixture of anarchic collage and montage styles sees Batts in full flight as an artist, relegating fetish imagery to a very minor rôle as source material. The main feature on the DVD (below right) — a jerky blend of collage, montage, stop-frame animation and other techniques — is similarly bereft of much that could be called fetish-friendly. And like the free CD tucked into the book, it features some brain-numbing death metal music.

Buy them if you just have to have everything Batts has done, regardless. But don’t expect to encounter more than a ghost of the style that made him interesting to the perv market. TM (Reviewed Sep 05)
www.scapegoatpublishing.com
www.cultepics.com

BAD GIRLS HOTEL

BOB COULTER
Goliath, Frankfurt ****

This is one of two simultaneous offerings from Goliath (the other being Modern Vixens — reviewed below) which are both A5 size volumes packing about 350 images apiece into their chunky hardback formats. That’s a lot of pix for your bucks, a philosophy which I suspect is the publisher’s response to a market now accustomed to being offered vast galleries of digital photography on the internet.

In neither of these books, however, is quantity being offered as a substitute for quality. And both, in their own ways, will appeal to pervy sensibilities.

Coulter’s landscape-format Bad Girls Hotel is often deliciously dark, and his girls certainly look like they know what being bad is all about, whether or not it involves actual kinkery. He gets perv points for his use of the OTT room decor of Manhattan’s Carlton Arms Hotel as a surreal backdrop for the entire book, while his painterly use of colour and his eye for extreme perspective suggest great potential for (good) bad things to happen.

And let’s face it: if they’re not going to happen with these girls in these rooms, they’re not going to happen at all. TM (Reviewed Mar 06)
www.goliathbooks.com

BELUGA

JEAN VAN CLEEMPUT
Goliath, Frankfurt ***

Published alongside Dave Naz’s Legs, Beluga is one of those ‘concept’ photo books that isn’t exactly fetishism as we know it, but may well still hold some appeal for pervs.

Van Cleemput, ‘one of Belgium’s most acclaimed photographers’, used an old Chinese restaurant in Antwerp to stage a series of photographs of lingerie-clad models with seafood. The images are both stylish and stylised, and shot in a wonderful golden light that reminds me of Gérard Musy’s Paris catalogue shoot for Skin Two many years ago.

The juxtaposition of models with everything from a small shark to a large octopus is pretty much a one-joke story, but carried off with considerable panache. And at the back are a couple of dozen seafood recipes, so basically it’s like a soft-porn version of my Belgo cookbook. Which is fine by me. TM (Reviewed Dec 2004)
www.goliathbooks.com

BURLESQUE/FETISH AND THE ART OF THE TEESE

DITA VON TEESE
Regan/Harper Collins, New York *****

This coffee-table tome is yet more evidence of Dita’s successful transition from subculture queen to mainstream celebrity. And it could so easily have been a complete whitewash, focusing on her acceptable face (upmarket burlesque artist, Gaultier model, rock’n’roll wife etc) while drawing a veil over her earlier career as a fetish and bondage model.

So all credit to her for being true enough to her roots (which, she reveals, are blonde) to offer up both sides of her personality for scrutiny in this unusual double-cover, half-and-half hardback.

Basically, what we have here is two books that start from opposite ends and meet in the middle. Each is a mix of relevant autobiographical detail (how she discovered fetish; how she got into burlesque performance, etc); historical contextualisation (how/why burlesque developed; the influence on her of the likes of Bettie Page and Betty Grable); and tips on how to achieve certain desirable female goals with hair, make-up, clothes, accessories and attitude.

The quality of photography throughout is a testament not just to how camera-friendly Dita is, but also how versatile for someone often supposed to have just one, albeit distinctive, personal style.

In all, it’s a charming confection, presented in the vampish language you’d expect from a professional vamp. But there are enough glimpses beneath the glamour to make it more than just froth. You can’t help but like a girl who owns up that, today, if not for a fortuitous Playboy typo, we’d all be calling her Dita Von Treese. TM (Reviewed Mar 06)
www.reganbooks.com

CUTS

THOMAS VAN DE SCHECK
Art-Manufaktur, Kassel, Germany ****

Thomas van de Scheck is clearly a skilled exponent of in-yer-face photography.
His A4 hardback book Cuts offers some 200 pages of vivid, provocative and sometimes quite extreme images that will undoubtedly raise the pulse of any fan of the Torture Garden take on fetishism, BDSM, body art and extreme performance.

Within these pages, feisty goth chicks and self-proclaimed sluts vie for our attention with ’50s glamourpusses, thighbooted doms, pasty-faced vamps, heavy rubber lovers, bondage babes, bleeders, slashers and flashers.

And there is, literally, never a dull moment. Every pose is animated, larger than life, theatrically OTT, and the models — a fit and tasty bunch beneath the fake gore and the heavy make-up — mug mercilessly for van de Scheck’s camera.

However outrageous some of the images may at first appear (especially to those seeing them through vanilla eyes), the common thread running through this cast of colourful characters is an unmistakable sense of joy in the rôles and scenarios they’re creating in the photographer’s studio.

The wild girls and boys captured in Cuts would probably like to be thought of as the shook troops of the European fetish movement, and if so, then at least they’re shocking with style. Even the book’s fake suicide has put on immaculate eyebrows and her best leathers before blowing her brains out against her artist’s easel!

OK, the book’s excesses won’t be to everyone’s taste (even the printing seems to have been done with extra red to make the most of the blood), but there is just so much life in its pages. Happily, pervery of the po-faced pc variety just doesn’t get a look in here. TM (Reviewed Mar 2005)
www.art-manufaktur.com

FASHION & FETISHISM

DAVID KUNZLE
Sutton Publishing, Stroud, UK ****

This is a painstakingly revised and extensively updated version of David Kunzle’s 1982 book about corsets, tight-lacing and related fetishes.

Back then, British-born Kunzle, Professor of Art History at the University of California, regarded the corset as a unique expression of the collision between fashion and fetishism, while acknowledging that tight lacing as a social phenomenon was long dead.

However, in the two decades-plus since the first edition, much has happened to the relationship between fashion and fetishism, and the author has added many new sections to accommodate changes which he could not have originally anticipated, such as the impact of the internet.

The layout and typography of this book give it the appearance of an Edwardian medical manual, but don’t let that deter you. Kunzle’s academic thoroughness is matched only by his passion for the subject, and though he may not be that au fait with the modern fetish scene, his authority in matters of corsetry remains unchallenged. TM (Reviewed Jun 05)
www.suttonpublishing.co.uk

A GUN FOR HIRE

HELMUT NEWTON
Taschen, Köln *****

The departure of any revered artist for that great studio in the sky puts a finite limit on what of their work, thereafter, can be offered to the world as ‘new’. Fortunately for us, Helmut Newton was a prolific artist, and one imagines that his widow June has been left with enough archive material to keep book publishers and admirers of the photographer happy for decades to come.

However, rather than putting together what could have been a random selection of images for this first posthumous offering from Taschen, June has chosen a theme which will be of genuine interest to Newton’s legion of fans: the work he shot for fashion catalogues, which, in her own words, “made him financially independent and enabled him to do the work that made him famous”. Some of his last fashion editorials are also included. This is work many of us will have never seen; or we’ll have seen only a small proportion of it. Putting it all together like this gives it new context.

The title itself is taken from Newton’s habit of referring to himself as a gun for hire. “When I was young and  poor and starting as a photographer,” he said, “I decided to accept any job that came along. I had made up my mind to earn my living taking photos, any photos, and not to treat my craft as a precious art form. I was quite ready to prostitute this precious talent that God had given me to make my living.” How many struggling photographers today would take heart hearing those words from a master of the craft? And how many more might learn something from them?

Newton has been an inspiration to fetish photographers pretty much since such animals have existed, and his denial that personal tastes inspired the fetishistic and SM content of his work has both intrigued and annoyed pervs. Many find it impossible to believe his famously kinky images were created without a genuine pervy sensibility behind them, but, well, he’ll never admit it now.

What matters to us here is: what does A Gun For Hire offer in that department? In a word: enough. Leafing through it is like leafing through one of those thick editions of Vogue in the mid-’90s when fashion photography was in love with SM style. You’d turn past pages of fairly sexy fashion, then every so often find yourself in perv heaven. Sometimes a whole outfit, sometimes just a detail would do it.

Dominatrix make-up. Beachwear teamed with black wigs, hose and heels. Killer fringes with corsets and stockings. Girls handcuffed to each other. A statuesque blonde mimicking an Allen Jones mannequin. A slinky swimsuit, shot from grovel level. It’s all here.

A Gun For Hire may not be solid kink from cover to cover, but for Newton’s many perv fans, it’s definitely a treat not to miss. TM (Reviewed Sep 2005)
www.taschen.com

JANESKO RENDERED

JENNIFER JANESKO
MG Publishing, Germany ***

Talented Kansas-based artist Janesko’s previous output has tended to see her labelled as a sort of ‘alternative Olivia’, so it’s good to see that she has decided to offer something different with this new collection, which focuses on her feature studies and sketches.

There is quite a range of different styles to be found in the book’s 120-plus studies of pretty faces and figures, and fans of Jennifer’s books and calendar art will undoubtedly find this book’s Artist Demonstration section fascinating, with its complete record, in more than 40 photographs, of the production of a painting called Frostbite. There’s also an appendix providing the artist’s notes on every image in the book — again, great info for the enthusiast.

In comparison with the latex-laden content of modern fetish imagery, one would have to say that Janesko’s oeuvre is basically fetish lite. And in fairness, the content of this book, because of its focus on faces, has rather less kinky content even than a collection of her pin-up paintings.

But as some studies here indicate, when she does apply her talents to ‘our’ territory, she clearly understands what it is that stimulates the pervy mindset. Which means: if she ever were to devote an entire book to fetish imagery, it would surely be a cracker. TM (Reviewed Dec 2004)
www.janesko.com

LATEX & NUDES

JAMES AND JAMES
Goliath, Frankfurt ****

Fetish fashion’s revered London photography team are so admired on the perv scene that people find it hard to believe this is their first book. But it is, and what a great title — not. Is that really the best Goliath could come up with to give it the requisite international appeal?

Never mind — fortunately we don‘t need a snappy title to tell us why James and  James are great. The proof is all there between the padded covers of this mini portfolio.

Many of the images here may be familiar. Some have appeared in fetish magazines, some come from the considerable body of work created for Inner Sanctum (including the book’s Masuimi Max cover), and yet others were originally shot for the duo’s regular employers in mainstream publishing, London’s Bizarre magazine.

If you were to ask me what particular contribution James and James have made to the kinky genre, I’d have to take a phrase from my erstwhile colleague Michelle Olley’s vocabulary and say ‘fetish gorgeousness’. For, back in the 1990s, as fetish magazines were making the transition from B&W fanzines to full-colour glossies, James and James were among the first to recognise and exploit the photographic value of the simultaneous move of fetish fashion itself from relentlessness black to full spectrum colour.

They brought a youthful, formally trained, fashion orientated, gay perspective to a subject area that had not previously benefitted from this combination. Today, they continue to bring to the genre an appreciation of larger-than-life femininity, character and fetish glamour which lesser mortals have only recently begun to explore.

As with all great photography, the eye for a great shot is of little use without the technical ability to deliver it, and the combination of James Stafford’s skill behind the lens with James Green’s Photoshop talents is no small part of their overall edge. And though this isn’t strictly a comment on the book, it’s worth putting on record that they are regarded by all who shoot with them as being just the nicest people to work with, bar none. TM (Reviewed Jun 05)
www.goliathbooks.com

LEGS

DAVE NAZ
Goliath, Frankfurt ***

I have to admit I’m grateful that with Legs, Dave Naz —  a charming and urbane individual — has shifted his focus away from the gusset-sniffing territory of his previous book Panties. There is just no way of making a book with a title like that look cool, and the whole cotton keks thing is so not what modern fetishism is about.

Legs are a much more legitimate area of pervy interest, though one has to wonder why a book almost entirely devoted to the delights of hosiery-clad limbs should have, as its cover image, one of the few nude pictures in the set.

A lot of the images inside were shot for US leg-porn mags like Leg Show and Leg World, but the book’s general style is very much that of showing the whole woman, not just the area specifically fetishised. Nina Hartley, author of the foreword, points out, “each model displays her own personality… some sport tiny smirks, others wide grins…”. You know, looking at some of these poses, I’d have looked for another way to say that!

Anyway, fans of US fetish models who appear regularly in European magazines are going to find plenty of familiar faces here. And if you like your pins clad in shiny Lycra, fishnet or classic seamed nylons, and your women photographed in the sort of domestic settings that can bring out the cutesy girl-next-door in some of the most glamorous fetish queens, then this is a book for you.

I won’t lie and say Legs is a gusset-free zone. But the gussets are mainly of the pantyhose variety and there’s only one really dodgy white cotton shot in the whole book. TM (Reviewed Dec 2004)
www.goliathbooks.com