“I don’t believe in art for art’s sake. I don’t believe in safe art. I don’t believe in art that’s apolitical, decorative or elitist,” says photographer Slava Mogutin, the subject of a new retrospective exhibition - Analog Human Studies - spanning 25 years of his work and currently on view at the Bob Mizer Museum in San Francisco. “We’re facing a worldwide epidemic of hate, bigotry and violence. It’s not the time for safe art.”

Shot primarily on analogue film, Mogutin’s portraits move between black-and-white and rich saturation, often featuring props (boxing gloves, gas masks and antlers, for instance) and explicit nudity. His images are often strikingly beautiful, yet there is also a sense of immediacy and imperfection. Over the course of his career, he has published more than two dozen books, exhibited in cities around the world, and collaborated with fashion houses including Helmet Lang, VETEMENTS and Commes des Garçons. He has also worked with some of the most significant queer artists and writers of the last century, including Allen Ginsberg, Bruce LaBruce, Edmund White, and Dennis Cooper.

San Francisco is a fitting location for his first major retrospective. Born and raised in Soviet Russia, Mogutin first visited the city as a teenager in the early nineties, spending two months there as part of a student exchange programme. “It was the tail end of the Aids epidemic, the newspapers were filled with obituaries, and the Castro felt like a collective grave,” he says. While he had been excited to visit this “gay mecca”, the experience had a chilling effect on him as a young gay man.

But the visit was not without its pleasures. He spent long hours at the City Lights Bookstore, the birthplace of the Beat Generation, and at Different Light, a bookshop in Castro where he discovered gay books and works of art that were then banned in Russia, among them George Platt Lynes, Herbert List, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom of Finland and Bob Mizer. “It was a real artistic and sexual awakening”, he says. 

Years later, he returned to San Francisco as a refugee, after being exiled from Russia for his writing and queer activism. He met and collaborated with photographers like Arthur Tress, Tom Bianchi, Marc Geller and Kelly Grider, and it was at this point that he took some of his earlier classic photos, some of which are now on display in the exhibition. Mogutin’s first paid jobs as a photographer were shooting for porn magazines, including Playgirl, Honcho, Inches, Mandate and Torso. “My editors always complained there weren’t enough hard-ons – the industry’s gold standard,” he says. Never interested in straightforward porn or nudity, he was drawn instead to roleplay, fetish, bondage and BDSM, anything that was more psychological and ambiguous. 

Many of his images, he says, were too hardcore for print porn at the time. Yet a few years later, when he showed outtakes from these same shoots at his first solo exhibition in New York, he found that they were celebrated. Christopher Makos described him as “the male Nan Goldin”, which he took as a high compliment. His works have an undeniably erotic quality, but he doesn’t see that eroticism as something separate. “Desire, vulnerability, sex, power – they’re all intertwined,” he says.

While Mogutin has been documenting the queer community for over 25 years, mostly shooting his own friends, lovers and collaborators, he rejects the idea of “community” as something stable or unified. “What interests me is disaffection and discontent,” he says. “My work isn’t about representation, it’s about proximity: fragments of lived experience; bodies that carry desire, danger and damage at the same time.” He’s not seeking to capture clean images or a fixed identity, but a series of encounters, which are “intimate, unstable, sometimes tender, sometimes brutal”.

Later in his career, Mogutin began to cast his eye backwards and seek inspiration in mid-20th century, pre-Stonewall queer art and literature, which he describes as “more experimental, more dangerous, more political and emotionally charged”.  He sees a parallel between his own experiences as a dissident in Russia and the way that figures like Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs and James Baldwin fought the system. “These people didn’t create because it was trendy or beneficial; they risked their lives and put their freedom on the line to express themselves in the most honest and radical way, with total disregard for the homophobic laws and morals,” he says.

These figures created work as a time when queer life was coded, criminalised and forced into the shadows, which “produced a different kind of eroticism, one that’s rooted in risk, secrecy and invention.” While he’s not nostalgic for that repression, he’s interested in what that pressure created – something akin to “a poetics of survival,” he suggests.

Many of the artists who have inspired him the most have been writers and filmmakers. “Rimbaud burned through language like it was a body. Genet turned crime and desire into mythology. Burroughs dismantled the narrative entirely,” he says. He is also drawn towards filmmakers like Pasolini and Fassbinder, who “understood the violence inside love better than anyone”, John Waters, who “glamorised gore and kink and ridiculed anything heteronormative”, and Bruce LaBruce, who “pushed queer desire back into confrontation – where it belongs.” All of these artists, he says, refused respectability in different ways. “They worked from excess, from contradiction, from the body. That’s the only place I trust.”

ANALOG HUMAN STUDIES: 25 Years of Photography by Slava Mogutin is on view at the Bob Mizer Museum from April 2 to June 13, 2026. Mogutin will also be doing a live event, in conversation with Hunter O'Hanian, on April 10.