Customer Reviews

Jungle Fever

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Jungle Fever is a dazzling excursion through the international underworld of beauty, humor and eroticism. Grace Jones on the cover, naked inside a tiger's cage is breathtaking. Also featured are Kellie the Evangelist Stripper, Sabu, Gene Kelly, Zouzou et many more. French artist Goude is a painter, photographer, dancer, couturier and more, an artist who uses the best means to get a point across. This book is out of print but search for a copy, it is the most original book I have ever come across.

Art Director Jean Paul Goude is clearly among those artists who faced their inner drives fearlessly and rewarded the world with unforgettable images of spectacular artistic merit, craft and style. This body of work was primarily created during the late seventies when sex, drugs and fashion were celebrated to a throbbing disco beat and new york city lead the world in hip/urban cultural expression. JPG was lucky enough to have found the entertainer Grace Jones and she, in turn, was smart enough to let him transform her into a legendary icon of performance art that fused fashion , music and a extra strong dose of stylishly erotic provocation.

People can choose to see his strong interest in black women as exploitive and racial insensitivity, or they can focus on the strength of a master visionary who captured the visual vocabulary of a specific time and place and maxed it out. The newly energized gay movement of that time fed into JPG's imagination, adding a heightened sense of the physical form and sensual drama to his portfolio.

A brilliant record of the party life in manhattan mixing high and low, black and white, women and men and everything in between with joyful abandon.

Goude and Grace Jones were lovers, and he is the father of their beautiful son, Paulo. He and Grace Jones created the vision for her magnificent "One Man Show" and much of the theatrics of her stage shows.

Goude writes brilliant essays to accompany his stunning photography of such concepts as 'Grace Jones,' Puerto Ricans, Gays of the late 70's.

It's one of my most treasured books and always is a favourite when guests drop by.

This book is nothing more than exotifying and continuing the racist (yes, racist) stereotype that black equals erotic. Goude is obviously obsessed with dark skin and links hypersexuality with dark skin (which has been a belief for several centuries).
He even mentions in interviews that he imagines black women with the backside of a "Race horse" (and even admitted to exaggerating images of a lot of black models who worked for him like Toukie Smith *because he really needed a black women with a backside similar to that of a race horse).
And even the term "Jungle Fever" implies that you have to be sick to consider black women as being attractive (and the old European colonial saying comes to mind "You can take the Negro out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the Negro".
It's time that artists be called out for their unashamed showcase of exotifying women of color, the last time I checked privilege was not a sign of being a genius.
Having a obsession with dark skin is just as bad as having a hate for dark skin, this isn't flattering at all but just another white male playing out his dark skin fetish.