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
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