Yukie, 1996 All photos Oren Slor, courtesy Feature, Inc., NYC. Yoko in Inakashira-Koen , 1996 Minh-chou, 1996 Tomoko in Shimo-kitazawa, 1996 Cover of City of the Broken Dolls. First session with Yuki (Tokyo, Dec. '93) , from City... Yuki in My Hotel Room in Tokyo, June '95, from City.... Cover of Sad Holidays , 1986. 1984

romain slocombe an interview by Walter Robinson Romain Slocombe is a French cartoonist, photographer, painter and filmmaker who is fairly well known in Tokyo and also in France as the "Medical Artist." He takes pictures of young Japanese women wearing bandages, slings, eye patches, splints, Band-Aids and various wrappings of white gauze. It is a fetish that is both comforting--the white, clean, fluffy, soft bandages are a sign of love and healing-- and ominous, as the bandages suggest injury, accident and the wound-- particularly, as a Freudian might point out, the most serious wound of all, the dreadful imaginary wound that is always the source of the fetish. Slocombe got the appellation "medical artist" in 1983 after publishing a compilation of works by various artists all related to medical subjects--a book called Medical Art. It was an immediate hit in Japan and is now quite rare. Later he made paintings of bruised and injured Japanese girls wearing bandages, some of which he included in a booklet called Sad Holidays. The book tells the story of 15 Japanese girls who have a bus accident just as they begin a holiday in France and must spend their vacation in the hospital. He is an accomplished cartoonist as well; his first comic book was called Prisoner of the Red Army (1978) and he was a member of the group around the magazine Metal Hurlant. He began taking photographs in 1992. Slocombe is 43, married to a Japanese woman and has a 12-year-old daughter. Slocombe is also working on a documentary film about the New York erotic photographer Richard Kern, who he met when he had a show in Paris earlier this year. An earlier film Slocombe made in Tokyo, called Floating World, featured a lot of Japanese s&m fetish work. The movie caused a scandal when it was shown at the relatively conservative Arles Film Festival last summer. Slocombe is presently having his first solo show in New York at Feature in SoHo, where a selection of 17 blue-tinted photographs, 30 x 40 cm., are on view, priced at $1000 each, in editions of eight. He also has new book of photographs due out soon from Creation Books in London, titled City of Broken Dolls. We met him on the first Saturday of his exhibition to ask a few questions. Q. The models seem to take quite well to being bandaged up. A. They usually like it very much. Often they will tell a story, like one girl who said she cut her finger as a child and wore the bandage to school even after it had healed because she was proud to wear a bandage. Usually the models enjoy the session, and say afterwards, "It really felt nice with the bandages on." They get a bit excited sexually. Q. Is this specific to the Japanese? A. It's true that there's a long bondage tradition in Japan, a submissive tradition on the women's side, not in everyday life but sexually, they often like to play a submissive role. Q. How does this relate to you as a Frenchman? A. I've been interested in bandages since I saw a picture in a book where a doll had been broken and repaired with bandages, and the illustrator had painted the doll very realistically with black hair, and she could have looked like a Japanese. So maybe when I was a kid the double image of femininity as both the white bandage and black hair fixed itself in my mind. Q. So these are fetish photographs? A. The Japanese are very close to this particular fetish; there is a real link between my work and the way Japanese understand sex. When you are an artist you can recreate that in an artistic way. Q. You must have hundreds of these photos. A. Yes, I have quite a lot. Q. How do you find the models? A. It is so easy to find models. My wife is Japanese and my first model was a Japanese baby-sitter for us and she introduced me to her friends. Later I was lucky enough in France to find a few models who were in a theater troupe and liked to pose. Then it was during my trips to Tokyo that I found all the other girls. What I'm really pleased with is if I find a beautiful girl on the street and talk to her and convince her to pose for me wearing bandages. Q. Do women ever see your photographs and volunteer to pose? A. Yes quite often. I'm well known in Tokyo for my photography. Q. Do you have favorite models? A. Three main models have almost identical names: Yukie, Yuka and Yoko. They're all between 20 and 24, my models ... I'm really interested in the relationship between the photographer and the model...for me the bandage is very important, it makes something come out in the look of the girl, the fact that she is pretending to be injured...the communication gets stronger between the photographer & model... Particularly toward the end of the session. Their eyes begin to shine. Q. Lately in New York there's been much talk about what Hal Foster has called "Trauma Culture," referring to a range of things from Oprah to the photographer Nan Goldin, all involving the relation of pain to ideas of authentic subjectivity. A. In my work I think it is something else, an authenticity that comes from a time when you were a child, because when a child plays games, pretends to be something else, dresses up and all that, it's their inner self that is having fun. And I think that when a girl enters that little game and disguises herself in that childlike way-- we've all played doctor and nurse and things like that, pretending to be injured when we were kids--maybe the model goes backwards, regressed, in a sort of time travel that releases another sort of authenticity....And besides, there is no real pain. It's a all a game. Which allows them to relax more. Q. It's more erotic. A. And there's something reassuring about the bandages, they like being wrapped up. It's like when a women applies makeup, it makes them feel reassured. Q. What about the more typical s&m leather fetish, do you do any of that kind of work? A. When I first met Yuka she was working in a fetish shop in Tokyo...she was very stunning, very tall, long black hair, and she would come to the photo session with all the fetish gear she would borrow from the shop. I took some fantastic pictures of her. I'm not so much into the traditional s&m but its nice to have the contrast between the black leather and the white orthopedic gear, which constricts the same parts of the body but is white. I like to mix the two. Once I did a medical performance at a nightclub in Tokyo with Yuka and she appeared in black in black boots with a gag and her hands tied behind her back and I would remove those things helped by a nurse dressed in white replacing them with white things and at the end she was completely covered in white and walked off with a crutch helped by a nurse. Q. Where are you staying? A. In a big hotel in Times Square with 700 rooms now run by Vietnamese people. It's not very clean but it's perfect for me. I often take pictures in hotel rooms, it's convenient, you have a bed. I like white sheets if I don't have a hospital a hotel will work perfectly. Q. How do you think your work fits into the contemporary art scene? A. It's difficult to say because I've always resolutely and purposely ignored the details of contemporary art...as a student we had the choice between galleries and comics....and I chose comics and later Pop illustration, while doing my medical things. Q: Perhaps you're work represents the clash between the French and the Indochinese culture? A: I think if it's symbolic at all it's a visual symbol, the injured person, when you walk in the street, even if you're not interested in bandages from a fetish point of view, the eye is obviously attracted by someone who is walking on crutches or has an arm in a sling, the white is very strong. People always look at people who are injured in a certain way. The injured person had an accident, she is already separated, that person is separated from reality and there's an aura around that person....For me of course it's a fetish, I would be immediately attracted if there were a girl with a bandage in the street. My bandages are a bit exaggerated like in a movie when you see someone has been injured the bandages are exaggerated, in Japan particularly so, maybe because the Japanese like people to wear the costume that is really proper to the situation. So Japanese in movies if someone is injured in the hospital you can be sure that the bandage will be enormous. So my girls are maybe movie patients rather than real patients. My doctor friend who makes the casts for me says that on the contrary to make people feel better they reduce the bandage very quickly so that the person thinks that he is really improving very fast...my bandages are really big and inconvenient and bandage-like...and that's what I like. Myself as a fetishist I'm satisfied if the model really looks like an injured person. Some people misunderstand and think that I'm excited if the model is in pain or that there must be some horrible scars underneath but it's not that at all. I'm more interested in the wrapping, in the visual, in the outside aspect, rather than what might be on the inside. The vulnerability and weakness also, that's why I called my book Broken Dolls. It does enhance the femininity of the model. I find it makes them really beautiful. Some people misunderstand me completely, people will say this is antiwomen he must hate women. To the contrary, I love them, not only as a male but as a person, a friend and a fellow human being. I admire their beauty, I envy them, being so beautiful. So in fact it's just for me a way of enhancing the women.