'Chocaholic' (2004)
Giclee print, edition of 100
Signed and numbered by the artist
(33" x 23.5")
six foot person and work to scale
Bob Carlos Clarke
1950 - 2006
Bob Carlos Clarke had a reputation as being a photographer of striking versitility as well as one of the world's finest photographic printmakers, well known for his erotic images, his powerful advertising work and his portraits of the famous and notorious, such as Rachel Weisz and Keith Richards, it was his non-celebrity, more abstract work that moved him the most.
Inspired, passionate and often controversial, Carlos Clarke was born in County Cork, Ireland. After moving to England in 1964, he worked in journalism and advertising before electing in 1970 to study design. His interest in photography bloomed during his first year of studies and by 1975 he had completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, London.
From his early days as an accomplished glamour snapper, Bob became an obsessive print-maker and serious craftsman, still happy to do rubber shoots for a sexagenarian gentleman pornographer called The Commander in between more ambitious commercial shoots or purely artistic studies of rocks, buildings and everyday objects. However, this direction that he had dedicated a decade to appeared to backfire on him when rubber party dresses became synonymous with bottle-blonde bimbos and sex shops. Away from his professional life, he remained an anarchic spirit, prankster and provocateur.
In the years before his death, he began to find that avenues that had previously been open to him were closing. When new magazines came out in the Nineties in the wake of Loaded, he wanted to work for them but found that his name was too closely associated with old-school Eighties celebrity style to impress a new school of art directors. Undaunted, he adopted a pseudonym, and successfully submitted work as "Jackal".
“Fashion,” he once told Bob Egan of the Irish Independent, “poses a far greater threat to modern woman than pornography, with its wild demands that she conform to that freakish body shape. Helmut Newton's work and my own accept the imperfections of women's bodies. We want to show women as they are."
He will be best remembered for his erotic images of women which attracted both controversy and critical acclaim.
