Roy Stuart is an American photographer and film director based in Paris. His stills tie glamour photography to a contemporary-art finish. The camera almost always sits on women, with a strong BDSM-adjacent look: cues of restraint, fetish clothes, voyeur framing, and erotic power that keeps moving. He does not shoot every frame as hardcore documentary. The pictures stay composed, and they leave something in the frame besides the act.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s he was in New York, doing several jobs at once. As an actor he had a bit part in The Godfather Part II, an American soldier home from the Second World War. He also worked as a musician and in a color photo lab. He then moved to London and became a photographer, making images that mixed fashion glamour, art-world finish, and a BDSM flavor. The first three photo books sold about 250,000 copies, which showed that fetish books could move like mainstream art gifts. He later settled in Paris and became central to Taschen’s less typical list. In 2002 Philippe Garnier wrote in Libération that Stuart, at a very high production level, had pushed erotic subject matter to the front of that publishing program.
For people who collect BDSM and fetish photography, he sits in a particular spot. Dian Hanson’s Leg Show is the long magazine theater of legs, shoes, control, and the glossy page as a stage for female erotic display. Stuart’s work is the Taschen middle path: more explicit and more charged with power than fashion editorial, and more composed and art-directed than a snapshot from a dungeon. The pictures hit as erotic and still sit as something a person might keep.
In film he moves between fetish glamour and narrative sex. With Francesco Dominedò and Stefano Soli he co-directed Tinto Brass Presents Erotic Short Stories: Part 1 – Julia (1999, 108 minutes), presented by Tinto Brass and produced by Giuseppe Colombo. The same year he directed Giulia, co-written with Joseph Simas and also produced by Colombo (85 minutes). In 2008 he co-wrote and directed The Lost Door with Rémi Bohrt, with additional music by Gary Lucas, carrying the still-photo fetish look into film language. The people in the work are adults.
The book list tracks the changes in the work. Taschen published vol. 1, vol. 2, and vol. 3 in 1998, 1999, and 2000. Also in 2000 came 30 Postcards. Roy Stuart: The Fourth Body is 2004. Vol. 5 is 2007. Leg Show work, 1995–2001 is 2009. There is no numbered vol. 4. The Fourth Body is a separate book. In the 2010s, with Skylight and Mul, he published Glympstorys (2014, with Julia on DVD) and Lovers and Madmen (2016). For the Embrace Your Fantasies series he made Power Play: the Leg Show Photos and Getting Off: the Leg Show Photos, using Dian Hanson’s original Leg Show text. That run is what ties him into fetish photography’s print history.
