Etienne Braun. Fetish & Movie

Etienne Braun is one of the most important photographers of show business. His lens has focused on actors of the calibre of Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons on the set of The Merchant of Venice (directed by Michael Radford in 2004) and David Keith and Paris Hilton, the stars of Bottoms Up (directed by Erik MacArthur in 2006). The subjects of his photographic portraits also include Demi Moore, Martin Landau, Caroline Bouquet, Gerard Dépardieu, Catherine Deneuve, Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau.
Alongside his professional work in the film sector, Braun has undertaken a groundbreaking exploration of the imagery of fetishism. While taking into account the stereotypes of this genre, his investigation reinterprets them through an iconographic filter of Flemish matrix and psychological tension of a literary nature. The women squeezed into corsets or tied up in sadomasochist bonds wear masks that project them into a dimension that is more surreal than sexual, where the body is portrayed like an alienated form of still life. The eroticism displayed in his rigorously black and white photographs appears to move beyond the dialectic of pleasure and pain into a world of glacial suspension.