Bob Carlos Clarke's Darkly Charged Erotica Revisited

Bob Carlos Clarke's work was versatile, spanning celebrity portraits of fellow troublemakers such as Keith Richards and Marco Pierre White, to campaign work for brands including Levi's and Smirnoff. However, it was his darkly erotic studio work, shamelessly fetishistic but sharply intelligent, that made his name.

These richly toned black-and-white images often rendered women as objects - quite literally, with on/off switches or wind-up keys - but also as goddesses, aliens and mythical beings, as terrifying as they were sexy. In Carlos Clarke's most striking images, his models appear almost beyond human: powerful, assertive, commanding, untouchable.

Carlos Clarke had escaped to West Sussex College of Art after his years as a boarder, but never intended to become a photographer. It was a means to an end: he had developed a crush on a woman who worked part-time as a model, and so he offered her a photo shoot to see if he could seduce her. It worked, and they married a few years later. The marriage didn’t last, but Carlos Clarke had by that point learned the worlds a camera could give him access to: models, notoriety and a life charged by pure adrenaline that would prove dangerously addictive.

The exhibition at London's Atlas Gallery marks the 20th anniversary of his passing, revisiting his legacy with a display of rare and unique prints, previously unseen collages, and iconic works from Carlos Clarke’s last major series, titled Love Dolls Never Die. The Last Dolls by Bob Carlos Clarke (in partnership with The Little Black Gallery) will be showing at Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF, from 5 September to 26 September 2026.

Carlos Clarke was also indelibly drawn to the craftsmanship and formal qualities of latex. He was a deliberate, meticulous artist, working obsessively in the darkroom on images ranging from precise, richly detailed large-format exhibition prints to more experimental, expressive, gold-toned and one-of-a-kind artworks. Both appear in this exhibition and emphasise what Carlos Clarke’s daughter Scarlett sees as his ongoing influence on contemporary imagemakers.

The exhibition also features a series of grainy still lifes of cutlery, a handful of dozens of found objects that Carlos Clarke collected during walks along the Thames at low tide. These images have a more contemplative, mournful atmosphere than his sexually charged portraits, and hint at a softer, more poetic side to a man who was, by most accounts, boisterous and confrontational company. “He had an ability to take an inanimate object and somehow make it feel human,” continues Scarlett Carlos Clarke. “If he wasn’t in the darkroom, he was always collecting or making things.”

Reflecting on his work twenty years on from his death, it is perhaps a sense of tension or oscillation that characterises his images: between indexical and chemical, wildness and restraint, and human and object.