John Stoddart
The Seductive Lens

EACH IMAGE appears totally natural, an instant plucked from life, a suicide victim, a car crash, a pallid girl in suspenders and black nylons looking expectantly from a window – is she waiting for her lover? Is she a prostitute expecting a trick? Has there been a crime and the cops are about to arrive? We don't know and the skill of these carefully arranged shots is their air of anticipation and intrigue; we really do want to know what's going to happen next.

Stoddart is influenced by the aesthetic of film noir, of David Lynch's Blue Velvet, of Hitchcock's Psycho. ‘The shower scene where Janet Leigh is murdered is totally electric. It sticks in our minds. That's what a good photograph should do. It should stay with us.'

In a John Stoddart shot you get the sensation that you're entering a private world. ‘I want the person looking at these images to feel as if they have witnessed the crime or the accident. They are with the girl in the photograph,\ or they are the girl. You might be the voyeur, but the shot is personal, you are connected.'

I am leafing through shots of Elizabeth Hurley, Amanda Donahoe, Catherine Zeta-Jones, leading celebrities scantily clad in sensual poses, rarely smiling. These aren't glamour shots or film star shots - they are guileless, steeped in ambiguity and passion. These are actresses at the top of their game, acting out roles for a static camera. But why?

‘It's all about vanity, not morality,' Stoddart suggests. ‘Nudity expresses drama and excitement. Women often want to go further, not in an erotic sense, but intellectually. Women appreciate the whole seduction package – the clothes, the underwear, the location.'

We are sitting in his apartment, a pile of books and a vase of orchids on the coffee table, the radio playing softly in the next room. He is dressed in a well-cut suit, shiny shoes – bench-made by Church, I imagine – gold cufflinks, a tie in a subtle shade of silvery blue. I wonder if he's having lunch with Lady Amanda Harlech or Princess Michael of Kent – or Tony Blair – they've all sat for his camera? ‘Not at all,' he replies. ‘I don't dress for other people. I dress for myself. The whole grunge thing passed me by. I enjoy nice things, nice surroundings.'

The apartment is sumptuous, fastidious, arranged with an eye for detail. From the front you have a glimpse of the houseboats on the River Thames, in London's desirable Chelsea. Inside you feel as if you are on the set for a movie, each feature revealing clues in a noir thriller. Is someone listening in from the cupboard? Is there a woman clutching a gun in the next room? The classic femme fatale doesn't walk in puffing on a king-sized, but her ghost crosses the walls in a mixture ofChinese silk prints and sensuous nudes from John's camerawork.

‘My pictures tell a story, but they don't have a beginning, middle or end. It's up to the person looking at them to make up their own mind. I want to take them into the depths of their own imagination. That's what Peep World is all about. You are peeping into your own fantasy.'

Peep World was John Stoddart's seminal collection of work published by Dazed Books in 2004. The images are edgy, cinematic, very confrontational. You wonder if the woman with legs splayed across the bed has come to blows with her lover and the ensuing fight has ended in unbridled passion. We find Liz Hurley and Zeta-Jones like we have never seen them before. ‘These girls are aware of their sexuality,' he says. ‘They want to look like sirens and that's how I shoot them.'

Stoddart has been doing his own thing in his own way for a long time, but Peep World was a Zen awakening to the critics. Katie Webb in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine was gushing. ‘In my favourite of John's portraits there is a poignancy to the sexual posturing of celebrity that makes his pictures so great.' In GQ, James Mullinger commented: ‘Stoddart's photography is unique in its portrayal of sex and fame...The fact that he has photographed everyone from street prostitutes to Tony Blair speaks for itself. Titillating, provocative, controversial and, most importantly, sexy – Stoddart is a legend.'

Not bad for a guy who left secondary school in Liverpool at 15 and signed on in the Grenadier Guards, one of the toughest regiments in the British Army. Six years later he left the forces with the most important quality a lensman can have: confidence in his own vision. He started hanging out on the music scene, shooting portraits of the new bands just making a name for themselves: Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran, Boy George, Echo and the Bunneymen.

Stoddart started taking photography seriously in the 1980's and his major influences – Guy Bourdin, William Klein, Weegee, Richard Avedon – come from that period. Europeans might be more sophisticated, but in his experience, photography in the United States at that time reached a high point in production values and quality.

Quality is Stoddart's watchword, his mantra. A slender man of 48 with brisk movements and lots of nervous energy, he may have learned how to be a perfectionist shining his boots to a glassy finish in the Guards, but his sense of flair and glamour is rooted strictly in the terraced streets of his childhood. ‘My mum and dad were working class people, but when they went out on a Saturday night they looked like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,' he says with pride. ‘The women were glamorous, they wore nice dresses and perfume – and sexy lingerie, I suppose.'

He is, as he puts it, a lingerie connoisseur. ‘Particularly hosiery,' he adds. He has a passion for nylon stockings, they capture the light, unsurprisingly he despises lycra. ‘You can never go wrong with quality. A pair of classy stockings and chic underwear give a woman style. I never shoot a woman without shoes. A naked woman in high heels feels fully dressed.'

His mission, he says, is to portray women as spontaneous, self-confident, superior beings, not subjugated by man, but as the wise leaders of the tribe. Stoddart's work has appeared in just about every magazine in the world, from Vogue to the New York Times to the News of the World, yet on one occasion his stills were rejected by the BBC ‘because they were too sexy for the show'.

His photographs are intimate and focus openly on sexuality. He embraces the paradox of the naked and the nude, the cerebral and the corporeal. Like paintings by the great masters, the shots are meticulously arranged, carefully lit, the contrasts vivid. You could be looking at the oils of Goya or Picasso, and I am reminded of Edouard Manet's Olympia, the painting of a nude prostitute considered outrageous when it was first shown in 1863 and now a classic, studied at the best art schools in Paris.

Stoddart grows reflective, ‘I remembering reading that the average career of a photographer is seven years. I feel lucky to have kept going for so long. Last week I went to Moscow to shoot Tony Blair with President Putin. I came back and next day I went out on a bikini shoot. If a commission comes along, I do it.'

Stoddart has a digital camera for taking snaps but is loyal to his Hasselblad and has a fondness for the large format Mamiya 7 with its wide range of lenses. He learned his craft in the dark room but discovered using a studio gives him more objectivity when he studies the prints. ‘When you use film the images are real. If a woman has curves when she poses for my camera she has curves in the photograph. They aren't brushed out or smoothed out by Photoshop.'

He takes a phone call. There's an project to arrange, a show to hang. I glance through Peep World once more. Alongside Hurley, Donahoe and Zeta-Jones there's Kiera Chaplin, Sienna Miller, Paula Yates, Ulrika Jonsson, Cornelia Guest, Martha Freud, Salomé, Paula Hamilton – with Alice Evans on the point of revealing a secret, Jerry Hall vamping for the camera.

It's all about vanity, not morality, I remind him. He shrugs and assures me modestly that portraits come from recommendations, usually through agents. ‘People seem to remember my studies of women but sixty percent of my portraits are of men,' he says, and adds, ‘I don't try to hang out with the famous just for the sake of it. If they become mates, that's another thing'.

There are essential ingredients to John Stoddart's success and he counts them off on his fingers: ‘You have to be able to communicate. I can't take a still life no matter how much I'm paid. I'm a communicator. I like to talk to people', he says and counts off another finger. ‘Honesty. I never try and sneak a naughty picture. When I shoot women I want to get them on my side, and you can't do that unless you're honest with them'. He pauses. ‘So, communication, honesty and, of course, attention to detail.'

With the cinematic quality and dark sensuality of his photographs, I can't help wondering if he's thought about making a film? ‘If I do it won't be an English film,' he says. ‘I would do something subtle, like Secretary ...' (1)

N O T E S
(1) Secretary (Double A films 2003) Dir: Steven Shainberg. Starring: James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal"

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