Romain Slocombe And the Eroticization Of the Broken Body

25 september 2026

“My work’s not only about my obsession with Japanese women, it’s about medical fetishism and my fascination with accidents.” — Romain Slocombe, 1997.

From Graphic Art to Medical Art

Born in Paris in 1953 into a Franco-British family, Romain Slocombe developed a career encompassing illustration, comics, photography, cinema, and literature. He studied art at the University of Vincennes and later at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris. During the 1970s, he was associated with the graphic collective Bazooka and contributed to the early years of Métal Hurlant, producing comics and illustrations within the context of the renewal of the French alternative press. His work from this period already reveals an interest in Japan and in the association between the female figure, bondage, and medical imagery, elements that would later reappear in his photographic production.

Japan acquired increasing importance in Slocombe’s career following a series of journeys to the country beginning in the late 1970s. This contact provided the artist with a visual repertoire that would extend across different media and contribute to his transition from drawing and illustration to photography. The recurring presence of female bodies subjected to alteration, restriction, or forms of immobilization allows Broken Dolls to be understood as a development of concerns already present in his graphic work, now transferred to photographic staging. What had previously been constructed through drawing came to emerge from the relationship between the model’s body, her posture, and the objects that modify her appearance and mobility.

Fig.1

Fig.2

Fig.3 Japan in Bandage, 1997

Broken Dolls: The Body After Rupture

Published in Paris in 1994, Romain Slocombe’s Kowasareta ningyō / Broken Dolls brings together photographs of Japanese women wrapped in bandages, gauze, casts, splints, cervical collars, and other devices associated with the hospital environment. Rather than showing the moment when the body is injured, Slocombe presents its imaginary effects, using accidents and injuries as elements of a photographic staging that leads the viewer to contemplate bodies apparently subjected to some previous action, of which only marks, dressings, and immobilizations remain. The Japanese title reinforces this condition, since Kowasareta ningyō (壊された人形) can be translated as “broken dolls,” while the passive form kowasareta, derived from the verb kowasu, to break, damage, destroy, indicates a previous action whose effects remain visible in the doll’s present state. The book is therefore organized around an absent action, since the photograph does not show the act of rupture, but the body after it.

According to the artist’s biography, his series of “medical art” photographs featuring Asian models began in 1992; the following year, Slocombe presented the exhibition Les femmes bandées at Deep Gallery in Tokyo and also staged performances connected with this visual repertoire. Kowasareta ningyō / Broken Dolls brought these experiments together in book form for the first time, preceding City of the Broken Dolls: A Medical Art Diary, Tokyo 1993–96, published in London in 1997, in which the artist would expand the series into a kind of visual diary of his experiences in Tokyo.

Although these images may appear to Western eyes as a denunciation of violence against women, such an interpretation does not explain how Slocombe constructs his figures. Women immobilized by bandages and medical devices may evoke the consequences of accidents or assaults, yet the insistence on these elements shifts the wound from a narrative function toward one associated with eroticism. The photographer’s interest seems to lie less in violence itself than in the transformation undergone by seduction when the female body ceases to appear as an intact totality, as it is covered, interdicted, fragmented, and marked by damage that can almost never be seen. In this respect, the title Broken Dolls already suggests a possible interpretation of the photographs, since it associates the woman with the ningyō (doll) while introducing the act of breaking as a condition of the image.

Fig.4

Fig.5

Fig.6

Become a Premium member now and the complete (very extensive) publication including the following paragraphs:

Clothing, Concealment, and Eroticism
The Eroticism of the Fissure
The Doll as a Body Under Reconstruction
Kusōzu: Impermanence and the Loss of Bodily Integrity
Beauty, Impurity, and Profanation
Beauty, Impermanence, and the Broken Body
From Kusōzu to Itō Seiu
Vulnerability and the Fractured Gaze
Between Rupture and Reconstruction
The Eroticism of the Partially Concealed Body
List of References
and 42 additional pics!

Click HERE for the scandalous "car crash" erotica In David Cronenberg's film Crash or HERE for the first part of a four-part article series entitled "Ito Seiu: The Art Beyond Pleasure and Pain"

What do you think about Slocombe's medical fetishes? Leave your reaction in the comment box below...!!