These pictures from my new project I have been working hard on over the Christmas holidays. I thought of what the streets might look like if inappropriate content could be seen in the streets.
My first trip was to take background images was to the West End of London. I had not been there for some years and discovered that some buildings had huge posters on their sides and others being renovated had posters and hoardings sometimes up to the height of two floors. This phenomenon was new to me
I have 9 pictures in the Taschen, Big Book of Pussy just published. Six of them are of the international pussy performer, Mouse. I have photographed her for over a decade after first seeing her at the semi-finals of the Erotic Awards, Stripper of the Year competition. She did not win that year but won it the same year I won the Erotic Photographer of the Year in 2002 for my book, Bernadinism; How to Dominate Men and Subjugate women, just beating Nobuyoshi Araki. She won a holiday for two to Hedonism in Jamaica, while all I got was a gilded wooden trophy shaped like a phallus with wings. The last time a photographed her was at the beginning of the year for the big article about her in the book.
I have documented her act both on stage, at her place and in my flat, where she often made a mess. We even once did a Sex TV documentary together. When I bought a video camera to document my work, I soon thought of her and she came around to my flat and promptly made a mess again, this time with yogurt. But before the yogurt I filmed her reverse strip, where she started off naked then pulled a nightie out of her snatch and put it on. Then in my corridor, she stuck giant sparklers up her vagina and anus and waggled them about. I could only shoot that once because of all the dense smoke.
We then shot her ping pong ball act. If you have not yet seen it here it is.
This photo was first published in my 2001 book, Bernadinism; How to Dominate Men and Subjugate women (Edition Stemmle)
Here are a couple more snaps not of Mouse that made it into the book. Another two b+w’s can be seen in the preview of the book on the Taschen website.
My Secret Life – my second favourite book (my first is Lord of the Rings). It is the sexual diary of a Victorian gentleman whose hobby was sex. He writes about his sex life from getting into his mother’s housemaids at 16, where at one point he had two sisters on the go, unbeknown to each other, chasing them around the house and shagging one in the outside privy or cornering the other in the kitchen sometimes on the same day.
It gives a candid insight into sexual mores of the time, which is a world away from Charles Dickens. He talks of feeling cunts in the street for sixpence, the habit of women washing out semen directly after sex to stop impregnation and child prostitution (the age of consent was raised to 13 in the middle of the 19th century).
He spent his inherited fortune on high living and high class prostitutes, went back to street ladies again. Got more wealthy later on, went travelling abroad, often boring holes in partition doors to view couples fornicating. The books goes up to his final illness in later life. I bought these for £1 each years ago.
The author of the book remains unknown although many have tried to come up with candidates. The original book, first published in 1888 in 11 volumes amounting to over a million words, was over 4,000 pages. In 1932 a New York publisher was prosecuted for reprinting the first three volumes and in 1969 a British printer was given a sentence of two years for a UK reprint.
Wandsworth Road
Oxford Street 1
Royal Academy of Arts
Vauxhall Cross
Southwark Cathedral
Foubert’s Place
Oxford Street 2
Oxford Street 3
Lambeth Road
London Bridge
