Gore, Decadence, and Sex in the Court of Herod

It’s hard to say why Salome’s dance and the beheading of St. John the Baptist have captured the imagination of so many gay artists over the years. Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Donatello have all been drawn to this biblical story of divorce, exhibitionism, and tones of incest.

And there are wonderful and lurid film versions of the story, including the 1923 version by lesbian actress Nazimova, who famously spent a fortune on her silent version of the story by Oscar Wilde where she played Salome in costumes designed by Natacha Rambova. Rita Hayworth killed it as Salome in the 1953 version. Early in his career, Pedro Almodóvar made a short, Salomé, in 1972.

Spanish photographer Qviron Lethebain has a particularly gothic take on the sordid story. 

Lethebain says, “I conceive my work from the point of view of an iconographer, of a faithful idolater who looks for the absolute answer in images. I see beyond. I fill every image with different meanings, put them in my inner world, transforming what I see and recreating precisely what I imagine. All of this makes me able to escape from anguish. I've faced my studies in visual arts as an initiation way, which can provide the tools to communicate these images that live in my silence. Theatre, design, photography, painting, art direction, costume cut and construction, dance, history … all of these subjects help me to present my own world to the outer world. The world where I´m not alone. That world where I can see, at last.”

See more on his website and his Facebook, Flickr, and Instagram pages.