“My images are definitely tamer than what people would expect,” says Steve Diet Goedde, a photographer whose work is showcased in a new book, The Beauty of Fetish. “Most fetish photographers shoot either to titillate themselves and their peers or to shock the uninitiated. They forget that there’s a person wearing all that leather or latex gear in their photos.”
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Goedde discovered the theatrical genre–typically associated with leather, latex, and an imaginative use of props–after dropping out of the School of the Art Institute in 1986. He was studying filmmaking but decided to take up photography on his own. He shot some pictures of a girlfriend standing on the back porch of his apartment. She was wearing latex gloves and a rubber torso. “I didn’t want to show her face because we thought we were being risque back then.”
Goedde relocated to Los Angeles earlier this year, and he’s now preparing for an exhibit at a Santa Monica gallery, where his photos will be hung alongside the work of such other sensualists as Robert Mapplethorpe. Currently he’s doing still photography for filmmaker George Hickenlooper, who directed the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and the recently completed The Big Brass Ring, based on an unshot script by Orson Welles. Hickenlooper’s latest project–a documentary on LA disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer–has Goedde shooting portraits of such celebrities as Brooke Shields, Cher, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, and Ray Manzarek. But hanging around Hollywood hasn’t tempted him to try filmmaking again.
