Tableaux

It is 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-elec­tion and the Brighton bomb; rev­o­lu­tion is in the air. Oliv­er Woolf is a thir­ty-some­thing writer, whose com­fort­able rou­tine is upset by a chance encounter in the rain. The girl in the rain is Can­dy, who is not what she first seems. Over the sum­mer, Oliv­er and Can­dy form an unlike­ly friend­ship, and when she stops call­ing on him, he sets out to find her. His search draws him into a labyrinthine sex­u­al under­world, where he meets some­one who will change his life for­ev­er. A late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry Rake’s Progress, Oliver’s jour­ney tra­vers­es the 1980s fetish and BDSM club scene and con­fronts issues that are still large­ly taboo. With pho­tographs by Steve Diet Goed­de, Tableaux com­bines art and sto­ry­telling in a new hybrid form.

‘Read­ing Tableaux was like revis­it­ing old haunts, or places I would have liked to have haunt­ed. It sparked vis­cer­al sense mem­o­ries and made me nos­tal­gic. And the end­ing …’ – Midori, sex­u­al philoso­pher and social catalyst

Dominic Jay is a for­mer arts jour­nal­ist. His pro­fes­sion­al life gave him priv­i­leged access to peo­ple and places that are usu­al­ly off lim­its, and some of the scenes in this, his first, nov­el are drawn from life. As he says, ​‘all writ­ers are voyeurs’.

Steve Diet Goedde’s first instinct was to become a film­mak­er. Only slow­ly did his atten­tion turn to pho­tog­ra­phy. His first book, The Beau­ty of Fetish (1998), brought him crit­i­cal acclaim and a loy­al fol­low­ing, which he has enjoyed ever since.