Here are some recent reviews of my new book.

Contents
UK
Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women

When viewing the work of Alva Bernadine, it helps to know in advance what to expect. Bernadine is a master of the unexpected – even disturbing. And would doubtless call parts of his work plain pornographic. But none of that detracts from the fact that Bernadine has a unique eye, which is why in the past it was all the easier to pursue legal action when another party appropriated one of his ideas.

Having had his work featured in prestigious publications as Vogue, GQ, Elle, The Sunday Times and BJP, Bernadine now has a book of his efforts in the form of Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women. The title is misleading, but only in the way all surrealism is misleading – it points you in one direction, then bursts a balloon behind the back of your head where you are not looking.

And there is no doubt that Bernadine is at his best when engaged in similar surrealism. Both space and time are distorted by his camera, exploring scenarios where components are not present, or are there in unexpected guises. One example is shown here, but suppose instead you are seated at a table with the arm of your jacket on fire and a glass of water before you: what do you do next? Bernadine has his hapless victim drink the water of course.

Make no mistake, there is humour here – even if it may at times appear to be in bad taste. There is also, it must be said, a lot of female genitalia and a little male, instances of which will never let you consider milk, ping-pong balls or a game of quoits in quite the same way again.

Before buying the book, perhaps it would be best to check out the website: http://www.bernadinism.com.

Jon Tarrant
Australia
Black + White magazine
Text David G Taylor

Welcome to Alva Bernadine’s home beautiful – a kinky burlesque of the wild, the wonderful and the what-the-hell?

“When I first began in photography eroticism was more implicit in my work,” says Alva Bernadine, Now it is more explicit.”

Who can argue? Just look at the Grenada-born photographer’s scrapbook, Bernadinism: How to Dominate Men, Subjugate Women and Stupefy Women. Ruled by an absurdist aesthetic, it features a collage teeming with butterflies and labia, bare bottom spankings, S&M subservience and a vagina with a glass eyeball blinking out. One chapter, “How to Become Debauched While Remaining a Virgin”, is illustrated by a woman throwing rope hoops at a man’s erection.

“I want my work to be as impactful as possible,” Bernadine explains, “so people will notice it.” It’s impossible not to. One of his most successful tactics is the recurring theme of the human body (mainly female) transformed into extraordinarily impractical objects of utility. In The Lover Illuminated by Lamplight his female subject is a light source for the benefit of a studious male. In Pair of Legs Reflected she is a mirror. Elsewhere, she might well be drying clothes on a washing line suspended from her pierced nipples, or serving as a human candlestick – a lit candle gripped tightly in her vagina.

And with his upcoming publication of his debut book Bernadinism, his work will be brought to the attention of art critics worldwide. Is he bracing himself for the inevitable accusations of misogyny? “I don’t really care,” he says. “Let them take it whichever way they like – they’re entitled to. I didn’t take up photography to make other people happy and make the world a better place. I took up photography to make myself happy and to make the world a nicer place for me.”

It’s a long way from his first gig as a door-to-door baby photographer. These days, London based Bernadine whose influences run from French surrealist photographer Guy Bourdin to fellow foot-fetishist Helmut Newton, is much more likely to be in the company of supermodels, for his work on such publications as Vogue , GQ Tatler and Elle. And it’s where he belongs. “I’m an exhibitionist,” he once said. “I need people to notice. That’s why I am always aiming for something extraordinary.”
UK

Amateur Photographer

You may remember an interview with Alva Bernadine in AP’s 19 February 2000 issue in which we looked at this master of surreal double exposures. He has been hard at work since then and this is the intriguing result. But buyer beware, you need a sense of humour as the sexually explicit nature of many of Alva’s visual ironies and jokes can be quite shocking.
While double exposure still plays a large part in Alva’s work, he is not a one-trick pony. Wideangles close to the subjects, the juxtaposition of objects, and bright and saturated colours all confuse and amaze. Careful planning and flawless technique, combined with surreal imagination, are what distinguish Bernadinism. ’Topless’ ladies with two sets of legs are a common theme, and a high speed flash, bottom-spanking had me particularly enthralled. Every page brings something unexpected and if you look only once at any single image you’ll miss the message.
A highly entertaining book, but don’t buy your mother one for Christmas.

Damien Demolder
Italy

Translation from Photo magazine by Marina Imperi

“I am not trying to be provocative at any cost. What for other people are transgressions for me is ordinary language. For example: putting together sacred images and sexual images: I was brought up in a catholic environment, religion is part of my life. I consider any form of sexuality worthy of being photographed and therefore represented. What is wrong with putting an image of Madonna and an explicit sexual shot next to the other?" Alva Bernadine is like this. Take it or leave it, approve or disapprove, love it or hate it.

But to weaken a superficial moralistic judgement are the undeniable aesthetic strength and technique that elegantly form a scene with subjects that are always fascinating.

Deeply tied to the “physicality” of eroticism, never accomplice of gratuitous porno but attracted to its sublimity in dream, the product of imagination becomes flesh, colour and form. Nominated “UK Erotic Photographer of the year” in 1997 and 1998, Bernadine challenges common sense with photographs that beyond being “good” or “nasty” suggest a taste which is testimony not only of personal obsessions in his life but also of morbid fantasies that belongs to all of us, dreamt at least once in our life. Born in Grenada, in the West Indies, has been living in London since the age of six, where he worked for prestigious magazines like Vogue, GQ, Elle and Sunday Times.

“After I won The Vogue Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award for a series of photographs of shoes called “The Fetish” I was invited to shoot a reportage for Skin Two magazine dedicated to the worshippers of leather and rubber of every possible sexual orientation. That was very educational and made it easier to illustrate what is considered to be bizarre and unusual”.

His book Bernadinism - How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women” illustrates the path of a creator of images and atmospheres, to be read as a manifesto of a current of thought that express itself with signs: “Bernadinism” that is. Of what this photo-philosophic system consist? “I love the theatricality of surrealist images, like Max Ernst’s and Salvador Dali’s. The title of my book is taken after a sentence from the latter: “How to Dominate Men, Subjugate Women and Stupefy Children”. I add to surrealism the elegance of classical haute couture photography, the narrative of reportage and the perfection of advertising photography. Mix them all up and you get the “Bernadinian Cocktail” a photographic synthesis of my style and my way of looking at life.” Each of his images can therefore be read at two levels: on the surface a feast for your eyes a joy for your gaze, in the colour intensity, in the perfect structures of balances or wanted unbalances, in the planned exaggeration of tones, prospective, chromatic and volumetric contrasts. On the other hand the emotive reaction provokes in the spectator a reactive rainbow of different emotions: from surprise to complicity, from excitement and attraction to being disturbed and irritated.

Latex clad women pose perfectly in hyperrealistic kitchens; deformed grotesque bodies next to computers, explicit allusion to the ritualisation of subversive sexuality: sadomasochism, fetishistic objectification  of the body, especially the female body (the reduction of it to an object as in the image of a woman used as a lamp who provides light for her studious partner by a candle in her vagina). But all is calculated and made light with a touch of humour which demystify and, paradoxically, makes more dangerously attractive the fascination for his work.

The darkness of sadomasochist practices is belied by a sort of sinister joy: the erected penis of the slave man is used as a target for a domestic dart board; happy birthday balloons are attached to the model’s pierced nipples; masks used in the sex sessions are covered with flowers. Alva Bernadine is closely related to subcultures, especially Anglo Saxon, that see sexuality “other” as a form of social contestation see Richard Kern’s photos in the 70’s or more recently of Doris Kloster. But differently from them Bernadine does not exhibit scandal but deride it.

“Do I think I influence people negatively with my photos? I’d like to be the sort of bad company your parents warned you about”. Mission accomplished Mr Bernadine.

By Antonio Mancinelli
UK
It’s Surreal Thing

Alva Bernadine first appeared on the Skin Two horizon when someone suggested he offered us some of his surrealistic shoe photography that had won him the Vogue Sotheby’s Cecil Beaton Award back in 1987.

We duly published it. His image of a Kim West rubber-clad woman in high heels, apparently out walking an invisible dog which has stopped to urinate against a pavement bollard (The Great Urolagniac) is one of the pictures that stays uppermost in my mind from our early issues. And it is satisfying to report, that discovered again here, spread across two big pages, the image has lost none of its wit and artifice with the passage of time.

Grenada born Bernadine is not a fetish photographer in any conventional sense, and yet a substantial portion of his work has some fetish or SM relationship – sufficient I fact for him to subtitle the book How to Dominate Men and Subjugate Women. That’s a joke though and to see his work in such terms would be to miss the point by several light years.

If we must find a label, then I think ‘sexual surrealist’ is one that fits most aptly. And looking through such a substantial collection of his work as now one can courtesy of Stemmle, one would have to say he is a pretty fine sexual surrealist at that.

He sums up his philosophy in five words: astound, confound, intimidate and gorgonise. And he achieves these ends largely through optical illusions created both in the darkroom and on the computer. On yes my dears, Alva was morphing before the word – or the processing power that now so easily achieves it – was even invented. One example, his Anamorphic Sodomite – a naked woman who faces the camera from the waist up while presenting her rear view from the waist down. – is quite enough to do your head in, but there are many more.

He is also fond of the wide-angle, maximum focal length shot as a means of creating brain-challenging perspectives, and has a habit of visually dismembering or truncating perfectly respectable bodies to create images that defy logic and gravity.

Though he makes great use of outdoor locations and black and white film, it is his indoor colour work that impresses me the most. His use of colour is vivid to the point of being acidic, and images shot in his own brightly decorated kitchen and bedroom have the three-dimensional luminescence and other-worldliness of souvenir postcards from a Catholic candle shop.

With this approach, even a simple shot like Girl with Fly Away Hair, showing a rubber-clad model bending towards the camera, acquires a life that reaches beyond the two-dimensional page.

Fetishism may not be what motivates Alva Bernadine but his perspective on it is never less than intriguing. Bernadinism can thus be safely prescribed as appropriate alternative therapy for anyone who finds pervy photography sometimes too literal and po-faced.