Miss Meatface: Kat Toronto book gets a Valentine’s Kickstarter.
FEBRUARY 2022 COVER STORY: Kat Toronto’s Miss Meatface book, featuring Polaroid self-portraits of her retro-fetish alter ego, finally gets a Valentine’s Day 2022 funding campaign launch after a two-year delay caused by the pandemic. The California-born but now London-based photographer talks to Tony Mitchell about the life experiences that inspired her fetish fascinations and the traumas that led to the creation of Meatface. Our three-page article also includes extracts from the artist’s descriptions of her creative processes in the Circa Press book
Part 1: Kat Toronto Miss Meatface interview by Tony M
Miss Meatface, the retro-fetish alter ego of artist-photographer Kat Toronto, finally sees her much-delayed photo-book collaboration with London publisher Circa Press begin funding this month.
The eponymous book is devoted to Polaroid self-portraits of Meatface mostly wearing combinations of latex hoods and latex or fabric outfits, usually accessorised by masks, gloves and cigarettes.
She is frequently to be found posing in kitsch domestic settings evocative of the readers’ photos in vintage fetish publications like AtomAge. Most of these are solo performances but sometimes she is joined in the pictures by a latex slave played by her husband Garry.
With its Kickstarter campaign launching on Valentine’s Day and book release aimed for June, the Miss Meatface tome will join Circa’s growing catalogue of high quality, collectable volumes of fetish/erotic photography from the likes of Steve Diet Goedde, Alejandra Guerrero and Ifa Brand.
Kat Toronto is the first UK-based artist to join Circa’s growing ‘fetish family’. However, she hasn’t been UK-based for all that long. She relocated to London from her native California just over four years ago, after falling for and marrying well-known London scene figure Garry Vanderhorne, founder of Resistance Gallery and Lucha Britannia.
Dreams of living ‘an extraordinary life’
Kat saw the move to London as a chance to escape the limitations of working in a conventional day-job to support her creative activities, and to “try living an extraordinary life”. By moving to England, she hoped she could finally allow herself to “follow my heart, to follow my gut feelings, to freely create art”.
With the move she also hoped to leave behind the trauma of being diagnosed, at the age of 29, with cervical cancer. Finding out that she would need a hysterectomy pretty urgently, she had faced the stark choice of whether to first try for children.
Having children was something she’d not even thought about before, and ultimately she chose to forego trying to start a family, explaining that her partner at that time “wasn’t the right person”.
Kat grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, the only child in an eclectic, creative household. Of her parents she says:
“My mom studied fairies at a liberal art college; my dad is a photographer who went to film school.” He gave Kat her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, which provided her with a lot of fun. But, she admits, “I never had any desire to become a photographer at that age.”
When she was ten, her school staged a production of The King and I. Kat loved its Victorian costumes so much that she got her mother to teach her how to sew and began making outfits to dress-up in when she came home from school.
“All the foundation garments from that era absolutely fascinated me: hoop skirts; bustles; corsets. I loved how they could manipulate your body. I would sometimes model them for my dad, but mostly it was just me standing alone in front of the mirror, daydreaming.”
Amazing Stories inspire fetish feelings
When I ask if she thinks this might have been where her fetishistic interests started, her answer wrong-foots me.
Amazing Stories cover art like this on her dad’s wall stirred her earliest fetish feelings, says Kat
“My fetishistic fascinations and inclinations began waaaay back in early childhood,” she says. She then offers some background on her father, Richard Toronto, to explain why.
“Aside from being an incredibly talented photographer, my father is also one of the top scholars and a biographer on ‘outsider artist’ and famous — or infamous, perhaps — science fiction writer Richard Sharpe Shaver.
“In the 1970s my dad, who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s watching sci-fi films and obsessing over flying saucers, became pen-pal acquaintances with Shaver and his wife.
“It was at this point that my dad also began collecting as much of Shaver’s writing, paintings, and rock photographs as he could.” The latter were photos of stones Shaver claimed were ‘rock books’ embedded with legible pictures and text by ancient races.
“At this time,” she continues, “my dad also began collecting original cover artwork from Amazing Stories magazines [to which Shaver contributed stories].
“Many of them featured rather scintillating, sci-fi depictions of scantily clad damsels in distress, or sexy domineering Amazon women, all wearing skintight costumes that closely resemble the look and shine of latex and fetish-wear.
“It was one of these covers in particular that my dad had hanging in his bedroom that was the first visual thing to kick-start my lifelong fascination with fetish [see picture above].
“There was something about how the fabric clung to her breasts, the wonderfully eye-catching sci-fi space helmet/mask, and the waist cincher… and the way the little man in the spaceship looked longingly (or lustfully?) at her.
“Through my childhood and into my teen years I would always look back at that image and
wish that I could be that woman in the painting, wearing what she was wearing and be looked upon by a man like the one in the space ship.
“Well,” she adds with a chuckle, “you could say that man is Garry now! He’s got the hair, I just need to make him an appropriate costume…”
Mindblowing: Witkin, Bellocq, Molinier
In her teens Kat studied textile design at California College of the Arts in Oakland, choosing photography as a supplementary subject because she was “already familiar with the process and figured it would be an easy class”.
And that was it: she fell in love with the subject. “My teachers introduced me to the work of Joel-Peter Witkin, EJ Bellocq and Pierre Molinier, which blew my mind. I was using 35mm and colour 120 with little plastic cameras.
“Looking back, I think that Molinier had the most impact on my current Miss Meatface work, actually.
“From the beginning I was always doing self-portraiture, but the images I made were never straightforward: even then it was always me transformed. I was never comfortable asking other people if I could take their picture and everything else felt inauthentic.”
At what point did those self-transformations start to involve wearing masks?
“When I became truly serious about photography (around 2000, when I was at college in Oakland) I began wearing masks in all of my photographs,” comes her answer.
“This was right after I’d discovered Witkin, Molinier and Bellocq, and I wanted to bring that aspect of their photography into my own.
“At the time I don’t think I knew exactly why wearing the mask was super important but I think I wanted to remove my facial identity from the images as much as I could.
“Plus if I wore masks it also gave me more opportunities to make fun masks to wear in the images, and I always enjoy having a good reason to make costumes and props for shoots!”
Lady Viola, Ragwater Revue chanteuse
After college, Kat ended up back in San Francisco and from 2006 to 2015 worked fulltime as a librarian in Napa Valley. Although she says she loved the job, it was ultimately “just a day job to support the creative work”.
In the evenings she was singing in a band, Ragwater Revue, which started in 2005, and for which she created the stage persona of Lady Viola, a film noir femme fatale with a shady past and an eye-patch.
The band toured around the States and Kat started making her own hats to wear for performances. People asked where she got them, she began taking commissions… and suddenly she was also running a millinery business. She was still taking photos but by now they were mainly to promote her hats or the band.
Then in 2010 came the shock news that her routine pap smear had yielded abnormal results. Further tests confirmed that she had cervical cancer, and would need a full hysterectomy.
“Over the course of three years I had the surgery, quit the band and closed my hat business,” says Toronto. “I felt lost, but photography had always been a comfort and it felt like a good time to pick up a camera again.
“My dear friend Teri Varhol is an amazing photographer, and in 2014, it was she who really inspired and motivated me to jump back into photography in a serious way again.
“She works in various forms of Polaroid photography and suggested I try working with vintage Polaroid cameras because I was interested in making self-portraits using double exposures. So I got hold of a second-hand Polaroid Spectra camera and started making images.
“You can now create double exposures with the latest Polaroid OneStep+ model because there is an app you can download and connect to the camera via Bluetooth. But back in 2014 those didn’t exist and you had to figure it out using the original vintage cameras.
“So I did some research and found out that double exposures were possible using the Polaroid Spectra models. You could put the camera on self-timer, have it take a shot, close the camera and then when you re-opened it the self-timer would start again and take another shot, creating a double exposure. Magical!”
Double exposures done in ballet boots!
For these early experiments, Kat recalls how she’d drink half a bottle of wine and drag the coffee table into the studio, push it against the wall and put up a backdrop.
“The self-timer on the Spectra gives you about ten seconds, which was just enough to set the camera on the tripod and then get back into the frame and pose — a challenge in ballet boots because you can hardly walk in them. It was a bit treacherous.”
She drops the ballet boots reference into her story so casually that I feel obliged to ask just how she discovered such niche bondage-fetish accoutrements.
“As I recall,” she replies, “the very first time I saw ballet boots (among other things like leather hoods, extreme tight-lacing, etc) was in my early twenties, in Taschen’s John Willie’s Bizarre books.
“From that point on I knew that I wanted to get my hands on any and all of these amazing things featured in the photographs. But after much research online at that time (1999-2001) I quickly discovered that this fetish stuff was really expensive — at least for a twenty-something college student!
“But this only forced me to get creative with my fetish-wear tactics and I began to more seriously study historical fashion and costume and work it into my college photography and textiles projects.”
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