In pictures: Bob Carlos Clarke’s darkly charged erotica
A retrospective at London’s Atlas Gallery commemorates the 20th anniversary of photographer Bob Carlos Clarke’s death in 2006, presenting rare prints, unseen collages, and works from his final series. Clarke built an iconoclastic career exploring darkly erotic studio photography, combining fetishistic imagery with psychological complexity. His black-and-white compositions rendered subjects—often female models—as simultaneously objectified and powerful, deploying surrealist tropes of dolls, aliens, and mythical beings. Originally studying art rather than photography, Clarke was introduced to fetish aesthetics through underground latex culture in the 1970s, later engaging conceptually with representation, desire, and commodity in dialogue with contemporaries like Allen Jones. His practice spanned celebrity portraiture and commercial work, but his reputation rests on taboo-pushing studio studies that interrogated the boundaries between eroticism, fear, and transcendence—work that remained controversial for its treatment of the female form and its psychological charge.
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