FETISH GENERATION
Lee Higgs
Goliath

This digest-sized hardcover features one sumptuously coloured image per page, and runs from classic fetish images featuring bondage, dominance and submission to stills that have no overtly erotic content, but rather feature rock chicks posing in outfits that wouldn't raise too many eyebrows at your local metal club. Somewhere in-between the two are a number of striking alt. glamour images, and some very bizarre and vaguely unsettling photographs of girls in strange animal masks.

Lee Higgs' style is quite arresting. His use of colour - often blue backgrounds and red clothing - creates a slightly 'unreal' feel to the shots, as does his careful use of a washed-out style of lighting. Less consistently effective is the use of a wide-angle lens to distort the models as they lean into the camera. At best, this is very effectively unsettling, but too many of the images don't quite work for me. Thankfully, these are only a small part of the book.

As for the models themselves... well, if you're visiting Lurid Girls, I'll go out on a limb and assume you'll like these ladies, all of whom look to be part of the goth/punk/metal cultures, with tattoos and piercings to the fore.

And that's what I was alluding to in my opening paragraph. While London's fetish clubs insist - bizarrely - on continuing to pump house music out of their sound systems, the fetish scene is now obviously, inextricably connected to the alternative rock scene, and rightly so. Fetish Generation, by its title alone, clearly understands that.

DAVID FLINT

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