Eventually I did it ... I collected and published my photographs taken during my project "The Bizarre 50s"- inspired by the John Willie's "Bizarre" magazine. I hope you have as much fun as I enjoyed making the project.
Finally, just a few numbers: 180 pages into 1+1 volumes, five years of work in the studio, various locations, dungeons, four models, two mua and ... one photographer ;-)
Both "The bizarre fifties" volumes are here gathered in a single hardcover volume.
As a photographer and as a bondage practitioner I have created a collection of photographs taken by myself but with a 1950s vibe. I enjoyed inventing photo sets and creating the atmospheres of the years when both fetish photography and the fetish aesthetic itself were still in their pioneering period. Maybe I succeeded, maybe not. but I am sure that I will be able to keep you on this book for a few hours and if so I will have won my inner bet and I will be able to feel (even without being) one of the pioneers of photography fetish of the 50s. Have a good time !!!
Herein the book forewords:
There are historical periods that seem to condense everything and everything at once. They last only a decade, sometimes less, but in that decade the seeds of what will happen next are sown, for many decades to come. They are extraordinary periods of miraculous awakenings, of new inventions, of discoveries, of historical turning points, social and cultural revolutions.One of these periods is the postwar period, from about 1946 to 1959. What we can now call, without distinction, the "50s". There is no need to list everything that has happened, from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs to the Cuban revolution, from the Korean War to the first motorcycles ridden by the teddy-boys, when rock'n'roll takes the place of the already "scandalous" and "unleashed" swing. Moreover the 50s are USA branded, there is no way to escape; they are USA branded also in Japan and are USA branded in Europe; whether the Soviet wanted it or not, they are branded by the USA even in the communist block on the other side of the "iron Curtain". After a devastating war, after the first nuclear bombing on civil targets, after nazism and fascism, during another war - no less fearful than the one that just passed, lived in terror of the nuclear holocaust - people wanted to live, to have fun, not to think about it. To drown anxiety and worry, fear, grief, laughter and pleasure. People wanted "dirty sex", "dirty songs", "dirty riots". People needed to feel alive against the military rules of caged societies. People wanted to hear, finally, the trumpet blast that announced the end of anxiety, of terror, but the blast did not come. The war was over but peace did not come, the enemy had changed but the guns did not lower. It took a weapon to exorcise all this, a powerful weapon, a mediatic nuclear bomb, a cosmic cultural Big Bang. At the end, the bombs were two extraordinary maidens who became immortal myths: Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe; they exploded in cinemas and in print, in the fantasies of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. smuggled black and white and with a decidedly vintage flavor. Megatons of pin-ups to distract the minds from nuclear warheads, to embody male fantasies, to create a female model of being desirable and desired, objects but, also, sexual subjects. From those years there are still alluring movies and photographs, smuggled black and white and with a decidedly vintage flavor. They seem like things from other times but, perhaps, they are closer to us than we ourselves believe. Wars and terrorism, enemies changed but anxiety and fear unchanged. Europe and America are still living their long, very long war. But not only movies and women's magazines, the 1950s also brought "forbidden"magazines of all kinds, pornographic, erotic, of various and possible perversions. Two in particular, Bizarre in the USA and Kitan Club in Japan, paved the way for the fetish culture of the 20th and 21st centuries, to the modern aesthetic, still in force today, of bondage, corsets, mid-thigh boots and 18-inch heel shoes. ; the symbols of seduction that still rage in our imagination today, even when we do not feel clearly "transgressive", took the path of the masses in the 1950s and still travel in our popular culture.
