It’s aptly titled as the first full page photo to greet the reader is a guy chowing down on his own foreskin, his sphincter leaking you-know-what as the focal point.

    Queensland Pride asked Joe if that placement, and the bookend final photo, was his choice. “I wish. The art director did that, and when I saw it, I gagged! I loved it. He really did an amazing layout on the book. I just love it.”

    Joe’s parents were both from Calabria, and were very strong, a typical Catholic Italian-American family and his formative years were spent in Albany, the capital, in upstate New York.

    His interest in photography was piqued when he worked in fashion. “I was a fashion editor for years. I started when I was 19 in Italy as a fluke, and then came back to New York City and started working with Fairchild Publications, who do Women’s Wear Daily, etc. I loved it until I hit 30 and had a nervous breakdown and decided to change careers.

    “I bought a camera and started taking pictures. I am not a school person, I can’t be taught anything. I have to just do it and learn from my mistakes. I got my first advertising campaign six months after I bought the camera, and thought, okay I can do this.”

    Since then Joe’s photographs have appeared all over the world in advertising campaigns and in art photography books. He is a natural successor to Robert Mapplethorpe (although very much his own man).

   “He really was the person who combined art and porn successfully and opened paths that would never have been seen. I am inspired by Avedon, Penn, Skribneski, Tom of Finland, all of the great images that are classic and timeless.”

    In Uncensored the juxtaposition of naked men and architecture (fire places, windows) and interior decoration (frilly, floral curtains, etc) give the photographs a kind of perverse beauty. Do the props and architecture make the naked men respectable or do the men ‘corrupt’ their surroundings?

    “I think that it’s both. I love the idea of corrupting the surroundings, I never really thought about that. I love when people interpret things.”

    Although many of the photos are set against industrial landscapes, including urinals, they are much more pristine than would be found in ‘real’ life.

    This cleanliness bleaches the photos of grubbiness.

    “After (the previous book) Testosterone, people thought all I did was dark photos. I wanted this to be more like you were reading the X- rated version of L'Uomo Vogue. I wanted to retouch and gloss them, to make them look less hard, but taking the hardness into the daylight.”
    
 

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