Roy Stuart, Embrace Your Fantasies

Between 1987 and 2001, Dian Hanson, then editor of Leg Showmagazine, and photographer Roy Stuartcollaborated on over 100 fetish photo shoots, producing an intensely sexual, socially transgressive body of work unmatched in contemporary erotic photography. Stuart, influenced by authors Angela Carter, William S. Burroughs, and Georges Bataille, was and remains passionately opposed to commercial pornography and insisted every photo story subvert and skewer some societally imposed sexual taboo. Women are portrayed with strength and sexual agency; men are often submissive; all are adventuresome and fluid. Hanson selected the wardrobe to appeal to a range of sexual tastes, including stocking, shoe, panty, nylon, and rubber fetishes. Viewed today, the styles and attitudes speak to the liberal hedonism of 1990s America, when, under the Clinton presidency, erotic artists were afforded more creative freedom.

Power Play, the first volume in the series Roy Stuart: Embrace Your Fantasies, showcases photo stories addressing sexual power dynamics. All images are from the original transparencies, rescued from the Leg Show archives before the magazine’s demise in 2012, and presented with Hanson’s original magazine text.

Join us in a trip back to the prosperous, optimistic 1990s to explore your fantasies—and perhaps some you never considered—with the richly produced sexual subversion of Roy Stuart and Dian Hanson.