Transformation

It's fair to say that injury and recovery motivated me to get on with making the work I'd always wanted to, made me appreciate the time left. While I admire the work of many photographers who are out to capture 'truth', or to 'document', I myself am intrigued by artifice, says photographer G. Elliott Simpson. Transformation is the first monograph of the Toronto-based artist, featuring cutting-edge fetish photography. Simpson s world consists of rubber and latex, light and shadow and reflections. The viewer from the outside explores an unknown world, full of pleasure, lust, and desire. As the playwright, director and TV host Brad Fraser puts it: In some ways Simpson works like a film-maker. The initial photographs are just the beginning of a much longer, highly labour-intensive process. Backgrounds are painted, figures are retouched, distorted, changed. Viewing the final print is different from seeing the original proofs in the same way that seeing an artist s initial storyboards differs from viewing the finished film. The artifice that began with the costumes and props from the original shoot becomes so enhanced that the images take on a convincing naturalism authentic to the artist s vision and world view. The closer one looks, the more complex and unsettling Simpson s work becomes. It provokes questions about matters that go beyond the immediate and easy assumptions. This makes G. Elliott Simpson one of the most important fetish photographers of our times."