Jock Thomson is a Glasgow-based artist whose expanded practice of photography engages queer desire, intimacy, and the politics of representation, challenging the cultural frameworks through which the erotic body is regulated, obscured, or rendered abject. Resisting euphemism and sanitisation, Thomson positions pleasure as a critical site through which normative structures of visibility, legitimacy, and value can be destabilised.

Drawing from fashion, fetish, and fine art photography, Thomson collapses distinctions between high and low, public and private, and legitimate and illegitimate forms of image-making. In doing so, his work repositions queer intimacy as an aesthetic and political terrain—one defined by excess, performance, tactility, and the persistent negotiation of visibility.

Thomson’s affinity with tactile engagement and sensorial pleasure is manifest from production to exhibition. Working mainly with analogue shots exposed through direct flash, images are stylised and posed, yet immediate, confrontational, sometimes confessional; never coy. These constructed windows into queer life are highly produced, but through a DIY ethos that goes from model sourcing to the in-house fabrication of props, sets and costumes.

The use of latex is central to Thomson’s practice, simultaneously acting as surface, sculptural material, and heavily connoted cultural artefact. An ambivalent symbol, it invokes associations with fetish, protection, permeability, and the regulation of contact, while introducing instability, pressure, and contingency into the work. Images of distorted silicone fetish masks testily stretch the photographic subject between human and object, self and disguise: what emerges is a body that is present but not fully knowable.

Rather than presenting identity as fixed or authentic, the work embraces performance, artifice, and transformation. It considers how anonymity can produce confidence, how masking can enable intimacy, and how queer desire often operates through role-play, projection, and the freedom to become someone — or something — else.

He/Him

@h_olograms

Photo by Jock Thomson