Disappointed Virginity is the website of London based erotic artist, photographer and film maker Marc Blackie.

Thanks for stopping by, it's lovely to see you.

As well as the recent redesign, a new video "Suitably Rewarded" has been added to the film section and the previous films have now been reuploaded in the proper widescreen format they had originally been intended for.

Details of my recent "The Futile Nature of Eroticism" have been added to the other projects and the usual galleries have also had the pleasure of an extensive overhaul.

There are a few screenings of my films to be announced soon and exhibition details are also in the pipeline. You might want to join the mailing list to be kept informed about these - but more details will be posted here when I have them.

"Marc Blackie’s photographs depict a surreal, heightened eroticism in a manner that manages to be both playful and solemnly ritualistic. In elegantly-shot black and white photos – technically clear and unfussy – women with faces as impassive as kabuki masks (and sometimes, indeed, wearing actual masks) are depicted enacting little scenarios of power and contrast: light against dark; soft against spiky; innocent against corrupted; natural against artificial.

Nobuyoshi Araki is clearly a reference point in Blackie’s work and he shares the Japanese photographer’s interest in bondage themes, but also his dead-pan sense of humour. A more subtle influence, however, comes from the American Francesca Woodman. Woodman – who died by her own hand in 1981 - practised in her photography a kind of moody, backwoods surrealism, in which narrative has been siphoned away, leaving only a layer of queasy, erotic atmosphere and unanswered questions.

It is this same sense of the unknown – the feeling that something as banal as an ice cream cone can be utterly mysterious – mingled with a dark erotic impulse, that forms the heart of Marc Blackie’s work." - Jim Anderson