Lost Boys

Lost Boys, Slava Mogutin’s first monograph, is a compelling collection of his portraits and landscapes taken over the past ten years—since he was exiled from Russia for “malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and extreme insolence.” Although it was his outspoken gay writing that angered the Soviet authorities, Mogutin’s photographs caused just as much controversy. Provocative yet iconoclastic, his work transcends the conventions of male nude photography, confronting the viewer/voyeur with a raw style and new sensibility. A cross between porn and fashion, pop culture and marginal kink, Lost Boys is a poetic and sometimes raunchy journey into different obsessions and fetishes of the cosmopolitan urban youth culture. Crimean rasta boys, Russian wrestlers and military cadets, German skinheads, and football hooligans are among the subjects of these incendiary but intimate portraits.

Slava Mogutin was the last political dissident from the former Soviet Union and the first ever to become a porn star. He has received both critical acclaim and official condemnation for his outspoken writing. Chased out of his country at the age of 21, he was granted political asylum in the US with the support of Amnesty International and PEN American Center. Mogutin is the author of seven books in Russian, and his writing has been translated into and published in six languages. His photography has been exhibited internationally and featured in such diverse publications as i-D, Honcho, Visionaire, Bound &Gagged, BlackBook, Playgirl, Butt, and Stern.

Octavio Zaya is an independent curator and art writer. He is also an advisor to the Museum of Contemporary Art MUSAC, Leon, Spain; co-director of Atlantica, a bilingual quarterly magazine of art and culture; on the editorial boards of Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and Lab 71; and a US correspondent for Flash Art. Zaya was also a co-curator of Documenta 11 and the 1st and 2nd Johannesburg Biennial. He was a co-editor of Fresh Cream (Phaidon Press, 2000) and has authored and contributed to numerous other books. Zaya is currently organizing the 1st Biennial of Photography at Petach-Tikva, Israel.

Dominic Johnson is a writer based in London. He is a visiting lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London, and is completing his PhD in the theory and history of visual art and performance at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has lectured widely at such venues as King’s College London and Brown University, and is a regular contributor to periodicals and magazines, including Frieze and Dance Theatre Journal. He has published writing on artists including Genesis P-Orridge, Ron Athey, Vaginal Davis, and Manuel Vason, and is the editor of a forthcoming monograph on Franko B, to be published in 2006 by Pack.