9/2/2025/TUESDAY/2025/6:44:AM
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~RICKCASTRO:BAAL.RESTROSPECTIVE.1986~2025~BERLIN~
@marc.donnadieu - Interview with Rick Castro - August 2025
For over forty years, Rick Castro has been one of the most influential figures on the Los Angeles art scene. Stylist, writer photographer, motion picture director and curator, he was the stylist of George Hurrell, Herbert Ritts and Joel-Peter Witkin, was the designer for Michele Lamy's first menswear collection- Lamy Men, and collaborated as writer and co-director with LaBruce on the film Hustler White with Tony Ward.
Castro's first gallery opened at Les Deux Cafés, Hollywood, in 2002, and premiered the first Furry themed art show. In 2005 he founded Antebellum Gallery, the only fetish art gallery in America, which he ran from 2005 to 2017.
Semjon Contemporary Galerie in Berlin presents his first German solo exhibition in Germany
RICK CASTRO: BAAL. Retrospective. 1986~2025
from September 4th thru October 4th, 2025.
Artist talk with photography promoter, Nadine Dinter will be on September 9th. |
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~RICKCASTRO:BAAL.RESTROSPECTIVE.1986~2025~BERLIN~
@marc.donnadieu - Interview with Rick Castro - August 2025
– You said: “I proudly own my vision”. How would you define this “vision” for someone who has never seen your work?
Rick Castro~ I create images that explore lust and desire, melancholy and longing.
I want to present something that hasn’t been seen, or at least has a new twist. I push for hard glamour.
Not to shock, but to inform, with the awareness that everything eventually becomes accepted.
I made this statement recently because of misunderstanding and disapproving of my images for most of my photographic career.
This has all changed. I am now The Favourite. |
@marc.donnadieu - Interview with Rick Castro - August 2025
– How do you view your forty years of work today, its evolution, its different directions?
Rick Castro- Forty years is a fuckin long time. I have to grasp this now that I’m here, because it all seemed like a blink of an eye.
Since the beginning I was experimenting. Initially to see if I could technically create what was in my mind. Working with equipment, materials and formats that changed every five or so years.
Rejecting digital technology, eventually embracing it out of necessity. The nineties was definitely my kinky period. I spent a decade photographing street hustlers on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.
This became two books, (13 Years of Bondage, 2004, SM BLVD: Photographs of Hustlers & Remembrances, 2024) a script, and a movie, Hustler White, (1996).
During the early nineties I was told my work was too artsy for fetish, and too fetish for fashion. Somehow in the mid nineties that all changed and I was sought after by Drummer magazine.
The San Francisco leather/fetish themed publication that was the granddaddy of them all.
Then in 2000 I was contacted by New York based Flaunt magazine. They wanted me to shoot the first Dior Homme collection by Hedi Slimane.
And just like that, the times caught up with me.
Now in the mid two-thousands, I am somewhat “discovered” by the mainstream, but the interest is in my early work.
These days I shoot less, but with more intent. I’ve found waiting to present new work makes it stronger when you let it age a bit.
