Remembering Bob Carlos Clarke
Bob Carlos Clarke, why did you jump in front of a moving train last year and end your life? You were one of the greatest fetish photographers that ever lived, and it’s not the same without you.
What passes for fetish photography these days is a joke, and you were one of the only people who got it: you understood that it was more about clothes staying on than taking them off, that it was all about contour and personality. The girls in your pictures didn’t make stupid faces while holding their boobs, and you could bring sexuality to any object you photographed, even if it was a stone or a fork.
Wish you were still with us.
- Bob Carlos Clarke Official Site
- “Shooting Sex” and “Love Dolls Never Die” – His books, now collector’s items.
December 30th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Amen.
December 30th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Wow, I never realized that the album cover of “Phantasmagoria” by The Damned (one of my faves of all time) was one of his photographs. I’m so glad that someone else also sees that the allure of fetish photography lies more in creating an erotic sensation with lighting, movement, the gloss of a latex gown, and the threatening point of a stiletto — rather than an obvious Maxim (or Penthouse) image where the end culminates in REMOVING the very thing which is fetishized (the latex, the corset…so on) or using the item (s) merely as peripheral props.
I have so often been deterred from typical fetish photography because the photographer seemed most interested in how I was going to get naked. Nudity can indeed accent some images very nicely, and I have nothing against being the subject of an erotic image, but my idea of eroticism doesn’t lie in spreading my asscheeks.
An image that stimulates mentally as well as visually is always the most erotic — Bob knew that, and with his death went a great artist.
December 30th, 2007 at 5:37 pm
That last image – glorious!
December 31st, 2007 at 12:03 am
I absolutely adore the last image, I had a Damned poster of that image in High School. Something about the light breaking through the clouds and the gothypants lady – it is just Neat Neat Neat! Thanks for finally letting me put a name to that image!!
January 9th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Think about you all the time-always love you-andrew c c
January 29th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
a truly great man – he just didnt know it