Roy Stuart is an American photographer and film director based in Paris. His still work fuses glamour photography with contemporary art attitudes, almost always centered on female models and a strong BDSM-adjacent aesthetic—restraint cues, fetish wardrobe, voyeur framing, and erotic power without reducing every frame to hardcore documentary. Taschen published multiple large-format monographs of his photographs; as a director he is known for Giulia and The Lost Door, among other erotic film projects.
Life and Work
Stuart lived in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, working as an actor (his only widely noted credit is a bit part in The Godfather Part II as an American soldier home from World War II), as a musician, and in a color photo lab. He moved to London, became a photographer, and began shooting erotic images that blended fashion glamour with art-world finish and BDSM flavor. His first three photography volumes sold some 250,000 copies—mass-market proof that fetish-glamour books could move like mainstream art gifts. He later settled in Paris. In 2002 Philippe Garnier wrote in Libération that Stuart was quickly becoming “a locomotive” for Taschen’s atypical publishing program—high production values yoked to erotic subject matter.
Books
- Roy Stuart, vol. 1 — Taschen, 1998 (ISBN 3-8228-2912-9)
- Roy Stuart, vol. 2 — Taschen, 1999 (ISBN 3-8228-2929-3)
- Roy Stuart, vol. 3 — Taschen, 2000 (ISBN 3-8228-3584-6)
- 30 Postcards — Taschen Postcard Book Series, 2000 (ISBN 9783822860847)
- Roy Stuart: The Fourth Body — Taschen, 2004 (ISBN 3-8228-2557-3)
- Roy Stuart, vol. 5 — Taschen, 2007 (ISBN 978-3-8228-4501-1)
- Leg Show work, 1995–2001 — Taschen, 2009 (ISBN 9783822839348)
- Glympstorys — Skylight; Mul, 2014 (ISBN 9783037666517); includes Julia on DVD
- Lovers and Madmen — Skylight; Mul, 2016 (ISBN 978-3-03766-664-7)
- Power Play: the Leg Show Photos and Getting Off: the Leg Show Photos — Embrace Your Fantasies series, with original Leg Show magazine text by Dian Hanson
Films
Stuart directed (with Francesco Dominedò and Stefano Soli) Tinto Brass Presents Erotic Short Stories: Part 1 – Julia (1999), produced/sponsored by Tinto Brass and produced by Giuseppe Colombo (108 min). He directed Giulia (1999), written with Joseph Simas, produced by Colombo (85 min). The Lost Door (2008), written with Rémi Bohrt and featuring additional music by Gary Lucas, continued his move between still fetish glamour and narrative erotic cinema.
For BDSM photography collectors, Stuart occupies the Taschen-glossy middle path: more explicit and power-charged than fashion editorial, more composed and art-directed than dungeon snapshot culture. The Leg Show collaborations with Dian Hanson’s editorial voice further root him in magazine fetish history—legs, shoes, control, and the glossy page as a long-running theater of female erotic authority and display.
