The Chameleon Body: Photographs of Contemporary Fetishism, de Nicholas Sinclair

Abstract

Nicholas Sinclair is an English photographer who lives and works between London and Berlin; His photographic work expressed a great commitment to the subject and exhibits an intriguing set of gazes where identities are exposed. In 1995, the Brighton Museum commissioned a series of photographs for the catalogue of the exhibition «Fetishism: Visualizing Power and Desire», the first monographic presentation on fetishism to be held in Britain. This initial photographic project along with other portraits of performance artists, modern primitives, and in general subjects who built their identity through the body gave rise to the book The Chameleon Body: Photographs of Contemporary Fetishism that Nicholas Sinclair published in 1996.

This review presents some of the most emblematic photographs that expose different points of view of the body that, like a chameleon, constantly transforms itself. We will try to enter through the camera of Nicholas Sinclair in a world that seems from another time, but that still remains beating below the surface, portraits of people that offer diverse and possible bodily realities, in some cases far from a false idea of the exotic.