Transformation is the first monograph by iconic fetish photographer G. Elliott Simpson who’s been taking photographs of men drenched in black paint since he came out of a coma nearly ten years ago. It features cutting-edge fetish photography that showcases rubber and latex and explores Simpson’s world of pleasure, lust and desire.
“In my photographs I’m responding to this particular cultural alchemy of fear and fascination, a strange collision between sex-sells-commercialism and Thanatos,” Simpson has said of his process. “I never know at the start of a session what or who my model will become.
Creation is complex and dirty. The charge for me comes when the figure is complete, the result itself not unlike solving a puzzle or equation.”
Like all gay men of his generation, Simpson was affected by the AIDS crisis and concepts of decay and death exist side by side with ideas of life and carnality.
The bodies he photographs are not in any way grotesque, indeed they are as beautiful as any commercial creation. It’s the images and textures in which he traps these divine models that makes his work unique.
Some have the skeleton of the subject transposed to the outside of the body, bringing representations of the living and the dead into a stunning harmony, others are trapped in ropes and puddles of a milky, viscous fluid that suggest cum, snot and spit, and there are others that depict two men involved in something that suggests both a sex act and a battle.
Simpson’s photographs also reflect some of the darker areas of popular culture and any comic book reader will see a likeness to the dark and gritty movement in mainstream super-hero comics which emerged in the eighties, Similarly, the Calvin Klein style ads that made the exploitation of the male body for advertising purposes as common as that of the female body, are recalled in this book too.
• Transformation is published by Bruno Gmünder GmbH
