Woman

Fascinated by photography since childhood, and by women since puberty, China Hamilton displays his subjects not just in terms of their nudity, but also in terms of the secretive sides of their sexuality.

This, the second of our China Hamilton anthologies, spans the work of ten years and inhabits dark regions of desire and compulsion where fantasy and reality meet in an unholy, fleeting alliance. In this collection, in which China has applied colour at the printing stage, a scene of bondage or sado-masochism might be washed in a melancholy blue, another of chastisement tinged with a lurid red; works of sombre beauty that are not, it should be emphasised, for the faint-hearted.