In Footage: An Nameless Rubber Fetishist’s Life in British Suburbia

The archive of nameless self-portraits which has come to be often known as Rain Time is as mysterious as it’s directly weird, poignant, and really fascinating. Salvaged from a home clearance within the London suburbs, this prolific collection of photos seem to span the Nineteen Sixties, and depict an nameless, female-identifying rubber fetishist utilizing their residence bathtub to take pleasure in a fantasy of deep-sea submersion. The assortment of round 500 photos, which was found amid 5 cardboard packing containers of newspaper cut-outs and ephemera, reveals a hitherto hidden story of sexuality, domesticity, and fetishism carried out behind closed doorways within the sprawling metropolis’s outskirts. In response to Sam Kilcoyne, the custodian of this treasured archive and the founding father of Augenblick Press, “The images actually prolong the horizon of our concept of quaint British suburbia.”

Rain Time, an exhibition of photos from this mesmerising assortment has now opened at London’s Horse Hospital. But, whereas the intimate photos are displayed in public for the primary time, their creator remains to be a complete enigma. “I do know near nothing in regards to the photographer. There aren’t any images revealing their face or any private particulars within the archive, so it stays a thriller,” Kilyconye explains in a dialog over electronic mail. “I’d say they had been most undoubtedly self-portraits, though there may be one other character in a few of the images which I’ve figured is a model.” One factor that appears sure is that they’d’ve been developed in a house darkroom, and – given the legal guidelines and mores of the day – Kilcoyne says “it’s extremely doubtless they’d have been tried for gross indecency had they used a neighborhood photograph developer.” On the entire, although, the photos “provide extra questions than they reply.”

Augenblick Press – a publishing home devoted to preserving and immortalising discovered pictures – is Kilcoyne’s ongoing challenge. “The identify ‘Augenblick’ is a German phrase which got here from a Rheingold report,” Kilcoyne explains. “It actually interprets to ‘eye second’, denoting a second in time – an Augenblick. I needed to make an everyday publication that married anomalous time intervals and located summary connections to encourage new tales.”

Figuring out clues as to the actual story behind Rain Time, he says: “Dwelling with these photos over the previous couple of months, I believe there may be an ageless high quality to the archive. They appear to dwell in a home chasm which belongs solely to the topic, indulging totally of their fantasy … an inside world of deep-sea submersion.” 

Kilcoyne named the exhibition Rain Time after a waterproof coat and rubber catalogue that accompanied the pictures. He believes the booklet was made by John Sutcliffe, a outstanding and influential dressmaker and fetish photographer whose restrictive clothes, leather-based and rubber put on lent the punk motion an important side of its distinctive aesthetic. The exhibition programme additionally features a screening of the 1977 documentary Dressing For Pleasure by John Samson. Named after one in all Sutcliffe’s magazines, the movie shines a lightweight on the last decade’s rubber fetishists and paperwork the intersection of rubber and vogue; look out for cameos by Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, the Intercourse Pistols, and Jordan Mooney amongst extra.

Speaking with Kilcoyne about his impressions of the mysterious pictures, he says, “Indisputably, it’s a type of aquaphilia … however I believe what separates these photos is the truth that they aren’t explicitly sexual. They turn out to be one thing between the science fiction of Jules Verne and the movies of Frans Zwartjes.” Right here lies the distinctive allure of this extraordinary archive. “Numerous the pictures pumped out of Soho and intercourse outlets round Europe and the States was meant to fulfil a sexual fantasy for an viewers, whereas these photos have a humour and darkness which strike an interesting counterbalance.” We’ll doubtless by no means know who created these photos, however Kilcoyne concludes, “There was undoubtedly a very charismatic character and a gifted collage artist behind the digital camera.”  

Rain Time by Augenblick Press is on present at London’s Horse Hospital till November 17, 2022.