The Story of Rick Castro, the Photographer and “King of Fetish”

RICK CASTRO Fetish King: Seminal Photographs 1986 – 2019 | Opens 6th April

We speak with the fetish photographer, whose work is being celebrated at a new exhibition at the Tom of Finland Foundation, opening this weekend.

For Rick Castro, fetish is the ultimate manifestation of self; the very notion of perfection, if you will. The journey began one day in 1970, when the photographer – who has shot and interviewed Ron Athey, Alice Bag and Tony Ward for AnotherManmag.com – discovered a copy of A Clockwork Orange in his aunt’s secondhand bookstore when he was 12.

“It shocked me and made my young wheels turn,” Castro says from his Los Angeles home. “I was trying to put it all into context. The idea of glamourised violence and scary dystopia – it seemed to ring true. I started to see that is going to be the future – and it was. We’ve surpassed it.”

And in doing so, we have embraced fetish in a broader sense. Castro explains, “For me it’s all-encompassing. The 21st century is all about fetish. On the positive side, it is the appreciation on a larger scale of things that would not have gotten a lot of respect in the past, but on the negative side it’s that cult of personality that I think is a waste of time and lead to the banality of America if not the world.”

SEE THE COMPLETE ARTICLE BY MISS ROSEN

Published: 5th April 2019

Categorised in: Art Offering