'Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.' So said Oscar Wilde. But power can manifest itself in many ways. With the Danish photographic duo, Vestholm, power rests in the realm of the imagination - undoubtedly the most erogenous zone. Just as we eat first with our eyes, so arousal begins with an image. Marianne Vesterled and Tue Holmgaard's image world is mysterious and seductive, though their eroticism is underscored by dark humour and elements of the surreal. This, their first book, is an invitation to a private performance. A story is unfolding, but each frame represents just a fragment. As Diane Arbus observed, 'A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.'
The book comprises a series of 18 untitled 'scenes', which unfold in places of privilege or degraded privilege. These are landscapes where Helmut Newton might meet Edie Beale. Place is rarefied, power relations can be complex and cliches about horror and pornography are turned on their heads. Images careen between the immaculate and the decaying, sternness and yearning, debilitation and liberation, predation and caretaking, yielding and control, cruelty and service and the dream-like and concrete. Vestholm's art presents a stirring rebuke to a world that is perversely content to serve up easy and didactic answers to complicated and thorny questions about sexuality, power, status and fear. They let us witness secrets, keep us guessing and ask us deep questions about ourselves and our desires.
