The book sprung from a three-year personal project in which Stockholm-based Belluso photographed ‘real’ people from the Swedish fetish scene. His subjects were essentially self-selecting and most were private practitioners rather than models or other ‘out’ scenesters.

Andrea personally financed the printing of 1,000 copies, the vast majority of which were soon sold — not bad for a hefty, high quality tome priced at €150 before you even added the shipping cost!

Swedish Fetish soon acquired the status of a unique and highly collectable record of fetish culture — though sadly one that was no longer obtainable.

Until, that is, some ten years later, Andrea’s wife and manager (and House of Belluso CEO) Amanda discovered the last 100 copies stashed away in boxes in a storage space.

“I was like, What the fuck?“ she recalls when I meet the couple for lunch in London’s Borough Market on a sunny July day. “You have all these beautiful books sitting here? That is not OK – we have to get them out there.”

And that’s just what today’s lunch is about. Having met the pair on an earlier London visit and heard about the fairytale rediscovery of this legendary fetish artefact, I requested a formal interview to get the project’s full back-story on record. 

I also wanted to find out just how photographing fetish people permanently changed the way a top professional photographer approached his day job.

This subsequent London visit by the couple made an interview possible, and I think I can say it went well. I came away from our lunch not only with the story I was looking for, but also with an offer to make the book available exclusively to Fetishistas fans at half its original selling price — see bottom of this article!

Andrea Belluso got his first commission to shoot for Italian Vogue at the age of 19, and his subsequent 30-year career as a photographer and video producer has seen him working with such fashion icons as Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell.

For years, he explains, he had admired the latex costumes worn by movie superheroes, as well as items such as “good-looking high heels”, without realising that these were actually fetishes.

STARTING A VOYAGE OF FETISH DISCOVERY

Unimpressed with most of the photography he’d seen of such stuff, he was keen to create his own images of “latex women”. In 2005 he was able to begin doing so, when he met Tintomara, owner of “a whole wardrobe of latex clothes” who expressed a wish to be his muse.

It was the start of Andrea Belluso’s voyage of fetish discovery.

Through Tintomara he met Elva, celebrated model and host of Sweden’s Dekadance parties. And with the encouragement of these two, he began photographing denizens of the Swedish fetish scene. 

Initially there was no thought of producing a book. But when Belluso showed art director friend Armando Chitolina the first 50 images from his shoots, Chitolina insisted that a book must be the final outcome. 

In the next two years, Andrea produced more than 500 finished images, and with Armando onboard as creative director, the final images for Swedish Fetish were chosen.

‘I think a lot of people want to see darkness in modern fetish photography. But there aren’t that many people who can light stuff that way, even though they can shoot very nice, brightly-lit images of girls in latex’

The relatively sombre tone of this big coffee-table volume, with its all-black pages and photographs in monochrome or muted colours, evokes earlier days of fetish book publishing when such visual elements were sometimes employed to add artistic gravitas and/or legitimacy to edgy subject matter.

But, says Andrea, both the style of photography in Swedish Fetish (especially the noir-ish lighting) and the book’s design (with no white pages or page numbering) both evolved organically from the circumstances in which its subjects were shot — whether in private dungeons or Belluso’s studio.

“When you go though the whole book there’s a strong sense of atmosphere,” he says. “Even the photos not taken in dungeons have more than a suggestion of darkness about them. 

“I think a lot of people want to see that in modern fetish photography. But there aren’t that many people who can light stuff that way, even though they can shoot very nice, brightly-lit images of girls in latex.”

Happily, he has seen more fetish photographers “starting to go that way” in recent times. “But for me,” he adds, “in terms of lighting, the book was really the beginning of my playing with light as opposed to having preconceptions about how a picture would be lit.”

Expanding on this later, he explains: “I’ve always been very good at visualising how a picture would look. I would set up the lights and it would never take me very long to do that. I had a clear picture in mind and what I imagined was exactly what came out of my camera.

“Because of the way I was shooting the book — because with most of the people I photographed,