Popmatters.com | 2002

The Beauty of Fetish II is more austere, more traditionally "fetishist" than Lee Higgs' "Generation Fetish". Its effect, if not as immediate and dramatic, is more subtly totemic and psychological. Steve Diet Goedde reinvents images from the classic fetish repertoire: impossibly high heels, curves outlined in shiny latex, scooped breasts spilling out of conical black corsets. There is often a retro feel to the settings, clothes, makeup, hairstyles and the visual personae of models like Belle, Gina Velour and Yvette that places fetishism in the context of nostalgia: the attempt to recapture a lost image of desire. Where Lee Higgs explores fetish as a sign of social subversion and alternative community, Steve Diet Goedde represents fetish in psychological terms as the isolated pursuit of a remote and tantalizing erotic perfection.

The major differences between The Beauty of Fetish and The Beauty of Fetish II are the inclusion of more color shots and the change of scenery from Mid-West bleak to LA sleek. The first volume of The Beauty of Fetish was shot mainly in black and white, and the downbeat urban and industrial Chicago exteriors increased the retro/noir feel of the images. Volume II blossoms into color every few pages and the contrast with the black and white is startling. There is a tendency at first to seek out the color and pass over the black and white, but as the color's visceral jolt wears off, the book reveals itself as a study in the contrasting possibilities of black and white and color.

In the black and white images, Diet Goedde echoes the look of '50's and '60's glamour photography, often placing the models in unadorned, everyday domestic settings, by sinks, refrigerators and radiators. These out of focus, fuzzily familiar settings intensify the sharp, stylized images of the women and their outfits. The viewer is positioned in relation to a mythical past and confronted with erotically charged images, a representational technique that evokes those childhood moments when early libidinal stirrings focus on a specific object and the image of desire erupts from the pre-sexual sameness like Venus from the ocean. The black and white pictures conjure the past but never function simply as pastiche. Contemporary clues like the snake tattoo that curls around the model Yvette's upper arm, intrude anachronistically to disturb the nostalgia and temporally disorient the viewer.

In the color images, the alien splendor of the outfits (a metallic turquoise latex dress detailed with peacock feathers at the bust) emerges and accentuates the models' distance from ordinary social reality and conventional relationships. This effect is heightened by the color, which allows the otherworldliness of the models' appearances to achieve maximum intensity.

Domiana turns her blank, perfectly oval, eye-brow-less mask of a face to the camera, framed in poker straight black hair and slashed by red closed lips. The whole surface of her eyes is whitened by contact lenses that hide the irises and leave only tiny black pupils. These dots and the red of her mouth are the only relief in the snowy emptiness of her face. Her right upper arm is decorated with a red, gold, green and yellow tattoo depicting waves and a spiral of fire. Her tiny waist is cinched in a black and red vinyl corset that blossoms out to enclose full breasts. The exaggerated voluptuousness of her body clashes with the mask-like face: a combination of android, zombie, doll and Kabuki mask. Her attention is both seductive and alienating, and the image manifests, in a moment of dream-like reality suspension, the charisma and danger of the object of desire.

Fetish Diva Midori sits on a gold patterned sofa, wearing a tight, full-length emerald green vinyl dress, a shiny black coat, pearls and black leather gloves. The camera is positioned slightly above and behind her to the left, so that only her ear, high cheekbone, the curve of an eyebrow and the fullness of her breasts appear beneath her lustrous, swept-back hair. Her face is turned away from the viewer, her eyes and mouth hidden. She withholds her attention, leaving the viewer to admire her back. Her attitude and the coat and gloves suggest one about to leave. This is an entrancing, Proustian image of the cold, withholding object of desire arrayed in all the cruel magnificence that the neglected lover can project on the beloved.

Psychologically complex images like these raise the question of why artists like Steve Diet Goedde must fight for their legitimate status against a sex-negative artistic establishment that automatically associates "fetish" with pornography. If we compare The Beauty of Fetish II to a collection of erotic "art" photographs like the first of the Graphis series Nudes, it becomes clear that what constitutes the artistic character of a great deal of "serious" nude photography is its mimicry of high art sculptural forms and portrait conventions. Herb Ritts's, Ania Walisiewicz's and Dennis Manarchy's statuesque male nudes, Ron Norton's gauze-draped females, Fabrizio Ferri's realist black and white portraits and Francois Gillet's naturalistic, painterly color shots are all highly derivative of sculpted and painted nudes in the various stylistic genres of Western art. It seems odd that this very derivativeness is part of what constitutes these pictures as "art". Despite the photographers' mastery of technique and their successful manipulation of aesthetic conventions, none of the images in Nudes possesses the dark emotional expressiveness and psychological density of the best of Diet Goedde's work. It is time for Steve Diet Goedde to be recognized by the major critics as the powerful and original artist that he is.

-by Michael Stephens, PopMatters