I’ve read enough Marquis de Sade to understand that sitting on objects such as candles, improperly folded parchment, and wax encrusted rope can offer a certain sense of pleasure within the penal system, but for some reason, the idea to sit on a bear head, magazine, or American flag had completely escaped my reasoning or need for its inclusion in my own quest for pleasure.

Collection Brad Feuerhelm

By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, February 2015

Under every new sun, there is a new fetish for my consideration. I was unfamiliar with the fetish term of “crush” paraphilia. I mean, I’ve read enough Marquis de Sade to understand that sitting on objects such as candles, improperly folded parchment, and wax encrusted rope can offer a certain sense of pleasure within the penal system, but for some reason, the idea to sit on a bear head, magazine, or American flag had completely escaped my reasoning or need for its inclusion in my own quest for pleasure. “Crush” fetishism is to derive sexual pleasure by observing or partaking in the smothering of animals, objects, or food with the body. There are various strands of this fetish including “soft crush” and “hard crush” and the more intense side seems to border on PETA hate material or neo-snuff bestial perversity. In the case of John K, the crush seems to be mostly focused on bread, which gives the added historical pleasure of deriving from the surrealists, who were also well known for being immersed in ass, critically and other. I can’t help but see Dali or Man Ray in these.

I bought about 100 of such images by a photographer named John K, real name John Kayser, who apparently worked in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles during the 70’s and 80’s. The patina of the photographs and the general ambience within confirm this chronology. They remind me of Carl Mollino somehow and their privacy adds an extra allure of the unseen and previously unobserved.