Keywords: Fetish photography, SM, sexuality, Skin Two
Title: Fetish - Masterpieces of Erotic Fantasy Photography
Author/Artist: Ed. Tony Mitchell
Publisher: Carlton
Media: Book
Reviewer: Pan
This is basically an updated and glossier version of Jurgen Boedt's Secret Fetish Photo Anthology, edited by Tony Mitchell of Skin Two fame. Like the original, this book aims to show-case work by the best photographers working in the fetish/perve scene. However, unlike the original, the production values match those of Skin Two magazine - good quality paper, good use of colour, excellent design and generally stylishly done.
The introduction by Mitchell attempts to set the scene a bit, but to be honest it's the pictures which are going to sell the book. As one would expect, all of the well-known fetish photographers are here, from Bob Carlos Clark to Trevor Watson to Eric Kroll, Richard Kern and Doris Kloster. Lesser known names include Nic Marchant and Sandra Jensen, both of whom may be known to regular readers of Nexus paperbacks. The European scene is well represented by the likes of Gunter Blum, Laurent Boeki, Wolfgang Eichler, Guy Lemaire and others.
May of the images may well be familiar to regular readers of the pervy press, though there are enough new names involved to keep things interesting. For me the pictures by Housk Randall-Godard, Jo Hammer, Herbert Hesselman, Giles Berquet and the batch of Chris Bell classics stood out from all the rest.
If there's a criticism of the collection it's one that is generic to all coffee-table photo anthologies - they are divorced from their context. Collected here in one place these 200-odd pictures soon lose their power to shock or arouse. The pictures risk becoming sexless, divorced as they are from the fantasies which inspire them. Part of the problem is that publishers shy away from the implications. What no mainstream publisher has dared to do yet is to marry a set of fetish photographs with a set of erotic fantasies or short stories. Come on, somebody, somewhere must be willing to put together the stories of Maria Del Rey, Penny Birch, Jean Aveline et al with a set of illustrative photographs…
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