A Modern Response to Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio

Project Overview

Forty-five years after Robert Mapplethorpe created his X portfolio, the spaces and communities that gave those images their power are disappearing. Cruising bars, fetish clubs, leather nights, and the backrooms that shaped a generation of queer culture are closing, relocating, or being absorbed into an increasingly sanitised mainstream. This project responds directly to that loss and to what remains.

KINK is a fine art photography project documenting Brighton & Hove’s fetish and S&M community, created in the spirit of Mapplethorpe’s unflinching gaze but rooted firmly in the present. Where Mapplethorpe worked in a New York scene defined by anonymity, danger, and the shadow of a coming epidemic, this project works in a city that is simultaneously one of the most queer-friendly places in Britain and one where the physical infrastructure of queer life is being steadily dismantled.

Context and Rationale

Mapplethorpe’s X portfolio was not shock for its own sake. It was an act of documentation, of legitimisation, and of artistic insistence that these bodies, these acts, and these relationships deserved the same formal rigour and aesthetic consideration as any classical nude. The photographs are beautiful because he demanded they be beautiful and that demand was itself political.

Brighton & Hove’s fetish community occupies a similar position today. It is simultaneously visible and embattled. Venues that have held leather nights, kink events, and fetish markets for decades face hostile licensing committees, noise complaints from new residential developments, and the quiet attrition of landlords selling to developers. The community itself is ageing in some respects, younger in others, and is having ongoing conversations about consent culture, inclusion, and what it means to practise kink in 2024.

This is the right moment to make photographs.

Artistic Approach

The work will draw on Mapplethorpe’s formal rigour, high contrast, considered lighting, and deliberate composition, while being made entirely on my own terms and in full collaboration with the community being photographed. This is not an outside eye looking in. It is a queer photographer with extensive lived experience of the kink scene, working with queer subjects to produce images that reflect their own understanding of their bodies, desires, and identities.

Photographs will be made in a range of settings: studio portraits using controlled lighting, environmental portraits within existing fetish venues and private spaces, and location work in Brighton’s queer geography, including alleyways, seafront spaces, and the remnants of the scene that still exist. The portfolio will include individual portraits, couples, groups, and detail work, hands, restraints, leather, latex, rope, skin, that echoes Mapplethorpe’s attention to the object as well as the person.

Where Mapplethorpe’s images often present their subjects as sealed, self-contained and slightly removed, this project will also make space for the relational. The tenderness between a dominant and their submissive. The intimacy of aftercare. The humour and play that are part of kink culture but rarely make it into the art. These are not lesser images. They are part of the truth of the subject.

All participants will be fully involved in decisions about how they are represented.

Understanding Kink: Desire, Power, and Identity

Kink is not a single thing. It is a broad and varied set of practices, desires, and communities that centre on the consensual exploration of power, sensation, role, fantasy and the body itself. For many people, kink is primarily erotic. For others it is deeply tied to identity, community and belonging. For others still it is a form of play, of ritual, or of psychological exploration that operates largely outside the erotic altogether.

Within queer communities specifically, kink has long carried meanings that go beyond the sexual. The leather scene that emerged in American and European cities after the Second World War was not simply about sex. It was about the construction of a masculine identity outside the norms of straight society, about chosen family, about codes and rituals that created belonging in a world that offered none. The hanky code, the hierarchy of the club, the protocols of dominant and submissive relationships: these were systems of meaning as much as systems of desire.

Kink also offers something that mainstream culture rarely does: a framework for thinking carefully and explicitly about power. Negotiation, consent, safewords and aftercare are not incidental to kink practice. They are central to it. In a culture that still struggles to talk honestly about desire, boundaries and the dynamics of power between people, kink communities have developed sophisticated languages and ethics that the wider world is only beginning to catch up with.

For many practitioners, engaging with kink is inseparable from their sense of self. The submissive who finds freedom in relinquishing control. The dominant who carries the weight of responsibility for another person’s experience. The person for whom leather, latex, or rope is not a costume but a second skin. The masochist who understands their own body and its capacity for sensation in ways that most people never will. These are not pathologies. They are ways of being in the world.

Queer Kink: Then and Now

Mapplethorpe’s X portfolio was made in a specific world. The New York leather and S&M scene of the late 1970s was overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly gay and defined by a particular vision of masculinity that was itself a reaction against the feminisation of gay men in mainstream culture. The subjects of those photographs are men. The desires they enact are between men. The aesthetic is one of hard bodies, defined musculature and an almost classical rigidity that owes as much to Greek sculpture as it does to the backrooms of the Mineshaft.

That world produced extraordinary art and extraordinary community. It also had its limitations and exclusions, many of which the people within it were aware of and contested even at the time.

The queer kink community of Brighton & Hove in 2026 is a fundamentally different proposition. It is not defined by a single gender or a single sexuality. Women, non-binary people, trans men and women, genderqueer and genderfluid individuals are not guests in the contemporary kink scene. They are central to it, shaping its culture, its aesthetics, its ethics and its politics. The bodies in this project will not conform to a single ideal. They will be big and smll, scarred and smooth, hormone-altered and surgically modified, adorned and bare. They will refuse the classical.

The expansion of kink beyond its mid-century gay male origins is not simply a matter of inclusion in the liberal sense. It has produced genuine change. Non-binary and trans participation in kink has complicated and enriched the community’s understanding of gender, of the relationship between the body and identity, of what it means to present oneself, to perform and to be seen. The concept of a leather Daddy means something different when the Daddy is a trans man. A femme in a harness is not simply a woman borrowing from gay male aesthetics. She is doing something else entirely, something that requires its own vocabulary.

Genderqueer kink also tends to foreground consent and negotiation in ways that have been genuinely generative for the wider community. When nothing about gender, role, or desire can be assumed, everything must be discussed. That necessity has produced communities with some of the most developed consent cultures anywhere in queer life.

KINK will interrogate this breadth. It will make photographs of people across the full spectrum of gender identity, body type, and kink practice. It will not impose a single aesthetic or a single vision of what queer kink looks like. The only constant will be the formal rigour of the work and the dignity with which every subject is treated.