Beauty Parade / Eric Kroll, 1997

Description

Beauty Parade

Beauty Parade is a large-format erotic photography book by American fetish photographer Eric Kroll, published by art-book house Taschen in 1997. It’s Kroll’s second major monograph after Fetish Girls and collects his highly stylized, BDSM-inflected images from the 1990s.

Key facts

• Author/photographer: Eric Kroll

• Publisher: Taschen (Benedikt Taschen Verlag)

• Publication year: 1997

• Format: Large hardcover, ~160–192 pages

• Subject: Fetish / erotic photography; bondage, latex, role-play

Background and concept

The book was conceived as a follow-up to Kroll’s hugely successful Fetish Girls (1994). After that breakthrough, Kroll left New York City for Los Angeles, where he set up a studio in a Victorian mansion and worked with professional models, developing a more theatrical, scenographic approach to fetish imagery. Beauty Parade gathers work from this period, presenting it as a coherent “parade” of characters and fantasies.

Visual style and themes

The book features around 140 photographs of mostly female models in high heels, corsets, latex, leather, and vintage lingerie, often engaged in bondage setups or power-exchange role-play. The images are carefully lit and composed, mixing humor, camp, and theatrical excess with explicit fetish codes—more “fantasy tableaux” than candid erotica. Commentators have described the work as “salacious” and “decadent,” but also ironic and self-aware rather than strictly pornographic.

Publication details and editions

The primary edition is a large hardcover monograph with trilingual text (English, German, French), typical of Taschen’s 1990s photography series. A related spin-off, Kroll’s Beauty Parade, was issued as a postcard book containing 30 images from the main volume. The original hardcover has become a collectible title in fetish-photo and photo-book circles, often sold through specialty art-book dealers and second-hand markets.

Place in Kroll’s oeuvre

Alongside Fetish Girls, Beauty Parade is one of Kroll’s best-known books and helped cement his reputation as a key 1990s fetish photographer and erotica editor for Taschen. It pushed his practice further into constructed fantasy, and many of its images are now frequently referenced when discussing contemporary fetish photography

191 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 34 cm
ISBN:
9783822886014, 3822886017