Roy Stuart. The Leg Show Photos: Embrace Your Fantasies, Power Play

Between 1987 and 2001, Dian Hanson, then editor of Leg Show magazine, and photographer Roy Stuart collaborated on over 100 fetish photo shoots, producing an intensely sexual, socially transgressive body of work unmatched in contemporary erotic photography. Now, discover these stories in their entirety, accompanied by the original Leg Show text, in Power Play, the first book of the Roy Stuart series Embrace Your Fantasies.

Between 1987 and 2001, Dian Hanson, then editor of Leg Show magazine, and photographer Roy Stuart collaborated on over 100 fetish photo shoots, producing an intensely sexual, socially transgressive body of work unmatched in contemporary erotic photography. Stuart, influenced by authors Angela Carter, William S. Burroughs, and Georges Bataille, was and remains passionately opposed to commercial pornography and insisted every photo story subvert and skewer some societally imposed sexual taboo. Women are portrayed with strength and sexual agency; men are often submissive; all are adventuresome and fluid. Hanson selected the wardrobe to appeal to a range of sexual tastes, including stocking, shoe, panty, nylon, and rubber fetishes. Viewed today, the styles and attitudes speak to the liberal hedonism of 1990s America, when, under the Clinton presidency, erotic artists were afforded more creative freedom.

Power Play, the first volume in the series Roy Stuart: Embrace Your Fantasies, showcases photo stories addressing sexual power dynamics. All images are from the original transparencies, rescued from the Leg Show archives before the magazine’s demise in 2012, and presented with Hanson’s original magazine text.

Join us in a trip back to the prosperous, optimistic 1990s to explore your fantasies—and perhaps some you never considered—with the richly produced sexual subversion of Roy Stuart and Dian Hanson.

The editor and author

Dian Hanson produced a variety of men’s magazines from 1976 to 2001, including Juggs, Outlaw Biker, and Leg Show, before becoming TASCHEN’s Sexy Book Editor. Her titles include the “body part” series, The Art of Pin-up, Psychedelic Sex, and Ren Hang.

The photographer

Based in Paris with a reputation as a grandmaster of the erotic camera, Roy Stuart has exhibited his work in numerous galleries throughout the world. He has already published a few bestsellers with TASCHEN prior to this collection of subversive, erotic fantasy narratives.