I would carefully open the group of locks that secures the cellar door. I would turn on the staircase lights, warm but not too bright, and as we descended you’d see more pictures on the walls: a Helmut Newton photograph, that you might recognize from White Women, showing a pair of manacled feet in supremely glossy red high heels. You would notice working drawings by shoe designers, some Warhol shoe sketches, and a large medical drawing of a foot blown up from Gray’s Anatomy.
At the bottom of the stairs we would stand together in a small cluttered workroom or office. You would see the rows of books and magazines all relating to my interest, books like Rétif de la Bretonne’s Contemporaines, John F. Oliver’s Sexual Hygiene and Pathology, Rossi’s The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe in several editions, magazines like Heels and Hose, Footsie, Instep. You would see filing cabinets bulging with photographs and newspaper clippings, and of course you would see my many, many scrapbooks.
I began making these in very early adolescence. I would look through fashion magazines, occasionally through softcore pornography. I would see shoes or bare feet that appealed to me and I would cut out the photograph and stick it in my scrapbook. I imagine a lot of boys do that sort of thing. Sometimes I would cut out the entire image to show the woman’s face, body and clothes. But all too often I found the face, body and clothes quite unerotic, quite irrelevant and a positive distraction from the shoes and feet. In those cases I would simply cut the woman off at mid-calf. This seemed a harmless enough activity, and it brought with it certain satisfactions. Yet I was aware that I was not master of my own fate. I was relying on the editorial control of the people producing the magazines. I decided to seize the means of production.
Like many men I used to take photographs of my girlfriends; of their faces and bodies, sometimes naked, usually clothed. But I soon became more specific. I began to take pictures just of their feet, resting on a cold stone floor, or on a soft fine rug. Sometimes they would be wearing shoes I had chosen and bought for them, sometimes they would be bare.
I suppose I’ve always been reasonably ‘successful’ with women, though it’s not a term I like. I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of girlfriends. I soon had quite a collection of photographs of their feet. Some found it odd, but few objected. When I was alone I would often spread out these photographs on my desk, arrange them in patterns, in groupings. They were an aid to memory, a kind of souvenir, but also a kind of harem. But, of course, there are far more women, far more attractive feet in the world than one could ever know or make contact with. And one of the greatest pleasures for someone like me is that one may encounter powerful erotic stimuli in quite casual, quite ordinary contexts in the course of one’s daily life. It isn’t like that for all fetishists. If you are obsessed with bare buttocks, there is a prescribed and extremely limited number of places where you are likely to encounter them; not in the street, for example, not on public transport, not in every home, at every party, at every nightclub. But these are all places where one finds beautiful feet and shoes.
Inevitably these encounters tend to be short and fleeting. A spectacular pair of FMs walks by you in a crowded street. You experience a sharp pang of excitement, but it is here, then gone. It’s true that I have been known to follow a really fine pair of feet, and that can be exciting in itself, but it is ultimately unsatisfactory. I needed some means of making these chance experiences more real and permanent.
I bought a small, leather shoulder-bag and cut a hole in the side large enough to accommodate the lens of a fixed focus, automatic camera. The camera was lined up with the hole, then attached to the inside of the bag, and I ran a cable release from the camera, out of the bag, up through the shoulder strap to my hand. I walked the streets carrying the bag, and when I saw an attractive pair of feet belonging to a woman who was standing at a bus stop or looking in a shop window or waiting for a friend, I would stand beside her as though I was waiting too. Then I would take the bag off and set it down on the ground with the camera lens pointing towards the feet, and I would squeeze the cable release to make a permanent record of the subject.
Results were mixed but not wholly unsuccessful. Sometimes the pictures were blurred, because I had nudged the bag or because the feet had moved, and sometimes someone would walk between us as I was taking the photograph, but, on the whole, I achieved my goal. I captured images of feet and shoes that I would never have been able to possess in any other way. They were a crucial part of the archive. If you liked I would show you these photographs, and also the ones I took when asking women to answer my questionnaire. You could see the completed questionnaires too if you wanted.
We could spend a great deal of time in this part of the archive, but sooner or later you might say that all these things were secondary materials. They were not the thing itself. I wouldn’t argue with you. I’d simply say, let’s move on.
We would then find ourselves in a small, comfortable, predominantly red room. You would see that each of the walls was hung floor to ceiling with thick burgundy chenille curtains. Light would come from a small overhead chandelier, and at the centre of the room you would see a small but plush loveseat and a footstool. You would see a small sideboard and what looked like a cocktail cabinet, but your eye would rapidly move to a row of glass domes on top of the sideboard, the kind used to cover stuffed birds or animals. Anticipating your interest, I would flick a switch and half a dozen spotlights would shine down on the domes. Instead of creatures, each one would contain a pair of shoes. You would see how special these were; one pair with nine or ten inch high heels, another a pair of open-toed ankle boots, another a pair of antique bar shoes. But you wouldn’t have time to inspect them closely because I would already be bringing the rest of the room to life.
I would open the sideboard to reveal massed, orderly rows of shoes. I would walk over to the cocktail cabinet, open its doors and show the illuminated interior, and on the shelves where the bottles and glasses should have been there would be an arrangement of kid court shoes in burgundy and black, purple and aquamarine.
Perhaps I would have the video set up in the room and now I would turn it on to show a series of stills, close-ups of shoes and feet in brilliantly crisp, clear detail.
‘Impressed?’ I might ask, and if, like Catherine, you half-nodded, half-smiled, I would look back as though to say, ‘You’ve seen nothing yet.’
I would go over to the far wall, take hold of one of the stretches of chenille and pull it back like the tabs of a small stage and I would reveal a walk-in cupboard behind it. This, you would see, was the real thing, the inner sanctum, the secret chamber. I would take you by the hand and suggest you take a much closer look.