Bob Carlos Clarke's Darkly Charged Erotica Returns to London
A new exhibition at the Atlas Gallery marks the 20th anniversary of the photographer's passing, revisiting his legacy with rare and unique prints.
The photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's darkly charged erotica is back in London. A new exhibition at the Atlas Gallery marks the 20th anniversary of his passing, revisiting his legacy with rare and unique prints.
Bob Carlos Clarke died by suicide in 2006, aged 55. His work was versatile, spanning celebrity portraits and campaign work for brands. However, it was his darkly erotic studio work that made his name.
These richly toned black-and-white images often rendered women as objects, but also as goddesses, aliens, and mythical beings. In his most striking images, his models appear almost beyond human: powerful, assertive, commanding, untouchable.
Carlos Clarke had escaped to West Sussex College of Art after his years as a boarder, but never intended to become a photographer. It was a means to an end: he had developed a crush on a woman who worked part-time as a model, and so he offered her a photo shoot to see if he could seduce her.
It was during his student years that he met an older man known only as The Commander, who published an underground magazine for fans of latex and rubber wear. The Commander had once been a frogman in the Royal Navy, and it was the sensorial qualities of his diving suit that had encouraged a fetishistic interest in rubber.
Later studying at the Royal College of Art, he became good friends with the artist Allen Jones, who would also court controversy for his sculptural works featuring latex-clad female forms. While both artists would face critique from feminist thinkers who felt the work was sexually demeaning to women, Carlos Clarke and Allen Jones were nevertheless drawn to a visual language of fetishism that could be read as both reproducing and interrogating popular representations of desire, commodity culture and the human psyche.
The exhibition also features a series of grainy still lifes of cutlery, a handful of dozens of found objects that Carlos Clarke collected during walks along the Thames at low tide. These images have a more contemplative, mournful atmosphere than his sexually charged portraits, and hint at a softer, more poetic side to a man who was, by most accounts, boisterous and confrontational company.
The Last Dolls by Bob Carlos Clarke (in partnership with The Little Black Gallery) will be showing at Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF, from 5 September to 26 September 2026.
