Emma Delves-Broughton: Deadly photo project bears sweet fruit
AFTER 15+ YEARS photographing gorgeous models in latex and other fetish attire, Emma Delves-Broughton embarked on a change of direction in 2014 with Deadly, a more personal project using a wider range of her creative talents. It gradually came together over the next seven years, resulting in publication of two books in 2021 and, now, a Deadly-themed exhibition in her home city of Bath. Tony Mitchell persuades his friend and collaborator from Skin Two days to recap on her earlier career and expand on the Deadly project – which, incidentally, helped win her a Royal Photographic Society Fellowship in 2018. With gallery of 24 Deadly pix!
Emma Delves-Broughton: Deadly is a new exhibition of the photographer’s work at Bath’s Widcombe Social Club, opening with a private view on September 29 and running until December 30.
Emma’s fetish-inspired photography was first published in Skin Two magazine in 1998, and appeared often in magazines, monographs. anthologies and exhibitions over the next 15 years.
In 2014, after publication of her third monograph Curves — a collection of fine art nudes, lingerie and latex self-published via Blurb — she embarked on Deadly, a personal project conceived to give expression to less-exposed aspects of her talents.
Deadly, she explains, was something she “wanted to have fun with — a supernatural explosion of sensuality and femininity”.
Despite including no latex — which she swears was not planned — the body of work she subsequently created under the Deadly theme should nevertheless resonate with today’s fetish tastes, which are ever more embracing of the ornate.
Far from merely shooting the photographs for Deadly, Emma used her extensive styling skills to create a world of beautiful, other-worldly vampires, Frankenstein’s brides, witches, ghosts, goddesses and other creatures from mythology.
Browse this article’s galleries and you will see that from as early as 2014, she was creating the kind of opulent customised headgear for the Deadly project that is now increasingly seen adorning models in today’s latex fashion shoots and shows.
In summer 2021, the work Delves-Broughton had created over this seven-year project appeared in her next two books, also self-published through Blurb.
The first, unsurprisingly titled Deadly, is a magnificent 12x12in (30x30cm) hardback of 84 pages, with its large images printed on finest art paper and a £140 price tag to match.
The second — and at £52.87, more affordable — volume is the author’s 82-page, 7x7in (18x18cm) Deadly Mini Photo Book. Both are currently available from Blurb (links below).
All the images in this article are from the Deadly book, while half of our gallery selection is also featured in the Deadly exhibition that opens in Bath at the end of September (details below).
There weren’t too many female photographers working in the fetish genre at that time, so the chance to include work of the standard of Emma’s was a no-brainer for me.
“It was really exciting,” she remembers. “That was my first time ever in any anthology. I was lucky enough to be featured in many other anthologies after that.”
Indeed, between 1999 and 2012 the photographer’s work appeared in no less than 16 anthologies, including my second Carlton book Sex: Take a Walk on the Wild Side (2002) and several more Carlton editions by my ex-Skin Two colleague Michelle Olley.
And one of Emma’s images submitted for my second Carlton book — featuring top UK fetish model Valeria Dragova wearing Inner Sanctum latex — made it onto the cover of the book’s US softback edition.
(The original UK hardback jacket featured John Dietrich’s portrait of a bullwhip-brandishing — but headless — Dita von Teese.)
That era saw an explosion in fetish photo books put out by mainstream publishers — pioneered, without doubt, by Taschen publishing Eric Kroll’s Fetish Girls in 1995.
The following decade provided Emma with two monographs from German publisher Goliath (pronounced: Golly-at). These were Kinky Couture (2003) and Kinky Nature (2010).
This was also the era of ‘non-backstreet’ adult/fetish fiction, pioneered by such imprints as Nexus and Black Lace.
Consequently, fetish photographers like Emma who’d been published in Skin Two or other genre magazines suddenly found themselves contributing cover images for a flood of kink-orientated paperbacks aimed mainly at female readers.
Delves-Broughton worked with some of the top fetish models of the era on both sides of the Atlantic. For me, one of the most memorable examples of her US collaborations was a photo of her infant son perched on the nylon-clad knee of American fetish supermodel Emily Marilyn.
We are reliably informed — you’ll be pleased to know — that the boy, who’s all-grown-up now and has just won a place at Oxford, has no plans to do a Spencer Elden (the Nirvana album cover baby) and sue the photographer!
“Yes, my son is now 18, and” — Emma reveals — “is not remotely interested in any of my photography. He has never complained about that photo, and of course, he wasn’t naked like Elden — he was wearing a smile and a fetching blue baby-gro!”
Emma has a teenage daughter too, now — a fact that prompts me to ask her how, especially when her kids were both much younger, the demands of motherhood affected her productivity as a photographer.
“My husband Nic is also a photographer, and he has been very helpful,” she says. “I couldn’t have managed without him.
“It has been very hard-going mixing motherhood with photography. I also had a few health issues and operations when the children were growing up.
“Getting freelance work was not easy, I was fed up, and I’d had enough. Nine years ago a part-time job came up that I was lucky enough to get, and I haven’t looked back.
“I’m now a part-time photographer, just doing the work I enjoy, and I’m a lot happier. In my day job I also get to meet a wide variety of photographers, which is great.”
Might a factor in the discontent she experienced a decade ago have been the acrimonious copyright infringement case she became embroiled in 2012?
Emma isn’t sure it played a part. But I find it easy to imagine that it could have done.
It all began when she discovered that a designer who had loaned some clothes for a model shoot was making unlicensed commercial usage of one of the shoot pictures, ignoring Emma’s written stipulation that the images were for the model’s personal use only.
The image was eventually removed from the designer’s website, but Emma’s requests for payment for the commercial infringement were repeatedly rejected, leaving her with no option but to sue.
She adds that she was “subjected to a hate campaign” on Facebook, which continued even after she’d won her case at the Patents County Court in London, with an award against the designer of £2,123 plus interest.
It was an important reminder to the fetish design scene that simply loaning garments for a model to wear in a photo shoot does not give the lender any ownership rights over the images. Although that was apparently not the lesson everyone took from it.
At the time Emma’s second Goliath monograph, Kinky Nature, had recently been published (in 2010) as a sequel to 2003’s Kinky Couture.
“I consider myself very lucky,” she confides, “to have had my first book published by Goliath in 2003. I had tried so many publishers, and had almost given up when they decided to publish Kinky Couture. I think I was the first women to be published by them too.”
However, it seemed that the German publisher, which had supported fetish photography for some years, had now begun seeking out harder-core source material.
So, after trying for a while without success to find another publisher for her next book, Emma decided to investigate the option of digital on-demand self-publishing.
“I attended a photo book workshop,” she explains, “and felt inspired. Why not give it a go? I thought it would be fun to put my own work together.”
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