This Photographer Captures People’s Secret Fantasies

This article originally appeared on VICE Belgium.

Desire is one of humanity’s most universal feelings yet one of the hardest to capture on film. Belgian photographer Jo Bogaerts, 40, based in the Flemish town of Ghent, dedicated the better part of the past few years to exploring just how to do that. The result is an ongoing series of raw and unfiltered shots now collected in the homonymous series Desire. “Photography is essentially a form of desire,” Bogaerts says. “You’re longing to immortalise something at risk of it quickly disappearing.”

At the beginning of the project, which started in the summer of 2020, Bogaerts mostly tried to portray his subjects’ kinks, fetishes and other fantasies. His process, which usually lasts between four and five hours, begins with a lengthy consultation in which his models confide in him about their desires and what happens when those desires are satisfied. According to the photographer, it’s this encounter that makes the difference.

He prefers to meet with the models in their own homes, so that the backdrop becomes an intimate reflection of their individual personalities. After all, it’s where people feel most at ease, and it also allows the photographer to get different results every time – “[results] I have little control over”, as Bogaerts puts it.

In the same vein of relinquishing control, Bogaerts doesn’t envision or set up any of the scenes he photographs ahead of time. It’s his models who decide whether they want to be photographed, what clothes they’ll wear (if any) and what elements or themes they want to be represented.

“It doesn’t need to be anything crazy,” Bogaerts says. “The first guy I photographed wanted to depict submission in his photos. This was something he’d desired all his life, but he’d never really been able to have that experience.” Two other subjects, a married couple, asked to be portrayed in an extramarital relationship. Another person wanted to get back in touch with her sexuality after breast reconstruction. Someone else wanted to show their desire towards their long-distance partner.

The process is “simple, but very intense,” Bogaerts explains, and it requires the photographer and the model to develop a trusting connection very quickly. “During my conversations with models, I’ve realised almost all women have dealt with some form of harassment or aggression from men,” he says. Many of his subjects opened up about their stories, which made the issue much more personal to Bogaerts than before: “So, when I’m photographing someone, I want to be sure they feel at ease from start to finish.”

He shoots everything on an analogue camera he received as a gift from a couple he and his girlfriend met while travelling. He became fascinated by the device’s fragility and by the lack of instant gratification in this type of development process. Bogaerts also wanted to use film for this project, precisely because of the strong desire that builds up when he’s waiting for them to be developed.

Recently, he decided to open up this project to the public, allowing people to send him their own desire-themed self-portraits.

“Ultimately, you never know how things are going to go during a shoot,” he says. “Images can be deceptive – they rarely match up with the theme we devised at the start.”

Scroll down to see more pictures from the Desire series.