New Times LA - Nov 8, 2001

Fetish photographer Steve Diet Goedde excels in his field, though he doesn't follow the usual rules.
By Martin Johnson

Photographer Steve Diet Goedde takes pictures of women who wear skin-tight latex dresses, catsuits, sky-high heels and occasionally nothing at all. But he doesn't mean to turn you on. Really.
"I don't like erotic photography," he says. "It seems fake to me. It's too obvious." His voice winces with a see-what-have-I-gotten-myself-into exasperation.

Most photographers in Goedde's subspecialty, however, would trade anything for his plight, which includes a new book and an exhibit about to open. Editions Stemmle, the Swiss photography publisher, has just released volume 2 of The Beauty of Fetish, a glossy, 116-page coffee-table number priced at $59.95. (Volume 1, published in 1998, won Goedde widespread acclaim.) And the Eye Five Gallery in the Brewery Art Colony, in conjunction with Coagula, opens a small show featuring seven of Goedde's black-and-white selenium-toned silver gelatin prints on September 29. (Each is priced at $850.)

These accomplishments have not been that easy to come by. The fetish underground, a growing demimonde of bondage lovers and extreme fashion fans, was slow to acknowledge Goedde's gift. "I got a lot of flak from the S&Mers because [my work] was all a lot of sanitized imagery of their world," Goedde says. "They just wanted to see nudity, and S&M play."

Instead of documenting their Story of O lifestyles, Goedde (pronounced Geddy) gave them measured character studies with roots in the work of Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus and early 20th-century portraiture. This is markedly different from other fetish photographers, whose main goal is to affirm certain carnal tastes, just as it differs from the broader world of erotic photography, in which sexual thrills routinely triumph over artistic impulses.

In addition to disappointing his obvious constituency, Goedde has been somewhat shut out of the magazine world. "I respect his work as a photographer," said George Pitts, director of photography for Vibe magazine. "But he works in a very narrow element, shooting marginal people dressed up in latex. I'm innately suspicious of people who specialize in one supposedly hip area. They have trouble doing other things."

For his part, Goedde says he's "trying to show that [fetish photography is] not as dark and scary as people make it out to be. Actually it can be quite beautiful."

Goedde works only with available light, and, unlike well-known fetish photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Joel-Peter Witkin, he never crops his pictures. "I'm a fan of limitations," he says. "I know very little about photography. I know how to do what I do and how to shoot what I shoot, and that's pretty much it." But, he adds, "I'm real happy not knowing more about my craft. If I had gotten well-versed in every angle of photography when I was younger, then I'd probably be doing bland studio work right now, repeating what everyone else does." Goedde has one other unusual character trait: He isn't motivated by money, typically sharing any income generated by his pictures with his models, with whom he collaborates on the entire process. For years in Chicago, he paid his rent by working as a buyer for a record store. Since moving to Los Angeles three years ago, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer and Web master.

Contemporary fetish photography revels in the gloss and high sheen of the latest studio techniques and gadgetry, an approach that is a good match for the shine and dramatic presence of leather and latex clothing, but Goedde's austere style brings more of a sense of the model's personality to the fore, and he frames his subjects with a painterly use of light. When a model called "Margaret" is seen checking her palm while wandering Tujunga Canyon in high-heeled ballet boots and mesh catsuit, the scene itself is nearly as much of a draw as is Margaret: What is in her hand? (It isn't clear.) Where was she seconds previously? Can she really walk in those spiky boots?

Although his portrait of Margaret may seem geared toward heterosexual male tastes, his work has many female admirers. Lisa Faraci, a pet-shop owner who purchased one of Goedde works during a show held last year at the Feitico Gallery in Chicago, explains the attraction. "He depicts women in his photographs the way I see women today, and how I think many women want to be seen. It is OK to be sexual and powerful. Women don't want to be just one or the other, but everything rolled into one. Goedde understands this, and photographs his subjects in a very multi-dimensional light."

Goedde dreams of broadening his work beyond the fetish ghetto, expanding into fashion and music, but concedes that the "ghetto" remains the best way to showcase his work. He's a presence, for instance, at the Erotica USA/UK conventions that tour North America and England. His photographs have received exposure both at various booksellers there and at the booth for Molly McGee's San Francisco latex design label, So Hip It Hurts. At the Erotica convention in New York in 1999, one booth attendant, Fetish Diva Midori, a nationally recognized instructor, writer and lecturer on S&M, fetish and human sexuality and author of a forthcoming book on the "art" of Japanese bondage, was dressed in one of So Hip It Hurts' custom outfits, a cheetah latex catsuit, which she augmented with a Louise Brooks bob and Fleuvog cloven-heel boots. Midori finished her presentation of McGee's line -- explaining the philosophy of the designer, her use of color and her nautical influences -- by handing out postcards of the clothes photographed by Goedde. Midori is also one of Goedde's most frequent collaborators and wrote the afterword to his first book.

Midori, clearly a fan, praises Goedde for his collaborative working methods as well as his appreciation of their shared fetishes -- footwear and confining garments. "Most of the photographers I've worked with take great pains in preplanning the shoot and/or shooting many images of one setting to get that perfect shot," she says. "Steve doesn't work that way. In a casual conversation or a stroll, he'll ask the model to move into a particular location. He might ask for one or two movement request, then he shoots a frame or two or three and then that's it. Steve truly appreciates the process and pleasure of my own fetishes. He's supportive, not intrusive. He never insists upon his vision or agenda of what the image should be and what the fetish should represent. That emotional space allows me to sit with my own vision of beauty and let that emanate from within me until it grows to a physical expression of movement and moment of being in the frame of his camera."

But they are dressed up as they are, and this is key. It's hard to imagine him photographing people in the latest line of clothes from Banana Republic, but his models wear daring and provocative outfits with the same casual aplomb that most people wear jeans. Men are another story for him. "Men just don't do anything for me visually. I don't see what women see in men. I don't understand what men see in men. I just see these hard, rigid, emotionless containers."

Goedde's father, a fan of Ansel Adams' landscapes, was a hobbyhorse photographer and taught his teenage son darkroom techniques at home in St. Louis. Steve began to develop a style based on his admiration of the work of Arbus and Avedon. He eventually went to school to study filmmaking, first at the Art Institute of Chicago, then Columbia College in Chicago. He had been moved by Stanley Kubrick's early movies (The Killing and Paths of Glory) and the Hitchcock classic Spellbound, which he especially loved for its lighting and emotional layering.

"My photographs consist of layers, too," he says. "There are visual layers, such as different depths of field and visual contrasts [i.e., subject matter shown in nontypical environments]. I like how Hitchcock blends elements of terror and suspense with romance and inner soul-searching."

The logistics of narrative cinema left him cold, however. "I knew I could compose a scene but I didn't have the patience for it [filmmaking]; you're dependent on so many other people and it takes weeks and months and years to get anything done. I lose interest after a while." He was just taking pictures of pals when, in 1991, he shot his girlfriend wearing a latex dress and latex arm-length gloves. The dance of light off the surface of the gloves is one of his best-known images (it's reproduced in volume 1).

Except for the work he did for So Hip It Hurts, Goedde used to work in black and white. His move to L.A. has expanded his palette: He has begun shooting in color. The Beauty of Fetish: Volume II showcases that growing phase of his career in a vibrant way. It's a big step away from the early 20th-century photographers like Edward Steichen, Lillian Bassman, Gertrude Kasebier and Baron Adolphe De Meyer that Goedde still names as his biggest influences -- although an even bigger influence, he says, is music: Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Billie Holiday and gospel choirs, among others.

"The actual music gets translated in a visual sense. Take the hands," he says, pointing to the picture of his girlfriend in gloves. "The background, out-of-focus area is kind of like the bass tones; the things that kind of pop up are kind of the percussion points. What's in the photograph [the gloves themselves] is the lyrical content." He pauses, and then adds, "I like to put a lot of bass in my photographs."