Pleasure as a Point of View: Romain Berger in Inspiró Issue 3
Romain Berger wants you to look. Really look. Not with the polite, distanced gaze we've been trained to use around the male body, but with appetite, with curiosity, with the kind of lingering attention that borders on hunger. His photographs earn that gaze, and they know it. We are thrilled to feature him in the third issue of Inspiró magazine.
The Paris-based artist works out of The Velvet Studio, a name that already tells you something about his sensibility. Velvet: lush, close to the skin, inviting touch. His images carry exactly that quality. They are tactile in the way the best cinema is tactile, you feel the warmth of the light, the drag of fabric, the electricity of a glance held a beat too long.
It's no accident that cinema sits at the center of Berger's formation. A film school graduate, he has folded that training into every frame he shoots. His references span the garish excess of David LaChapelle, the deadpan feminine wit of Kourtney Roy, the suffocating romantic longing of Wong Kar-wai, and the unapologetic queer provocation of Gregg Araki. That's a wide and wonderful spectrum, and Berger navigates it with the confidence of someone who has genuinely absorbed each of these artists rather than merely name-checked them. The result is a visual language that feels wholly his own: saturated, strange, sensual, and shot through with a lightness that refuses to take itself too seriously even when the images are undeniably erotic.
What Berger does particularly well is that thing the best erotic photographers manage and so many others fumble: he makes desire feel natural rather than performed. The bodies in his work are not posed in the stiff grammar of conventional male nude photography. They exist in spaces that feel lived in, lit by something close to memory. Everyday objects drift into the frame with a surreal ease, blurring the line between the intimate and the absurd. A bedroom becomes a stage. A mundane afternoon becomes charged with possibility. You're never quite sure where fantasy begins.
This blurring is intentional. Berger has spoken about his attraction to images that resist a single reading, photographs that open onto multiple interpretations rather than closing down into a single meaning. That openness is, in itself, a queer gesture: a refusal of the tidy, the definitive, the safely categorized. His images ask you to project, to wonder, to want. They create space for the viewer's own desire rather than simply illustrating the photographer's.
His two books demonstrate the range and ambition of that project. Life's a Cabaret wears its theatricality proudly, staging the body as spectacle, as performance, as sheer joyful excess. Men On Paper draws the register down closer and more tender, as though catching something that almost got away. Together they trace the full arc of what Berger's photography can do: from the exuberantly staged to the quietly loaded. His contribution to Sex Utopia, alongside queer art titans Pierre et Gilles and Bruce LaBruce, situates him clearly within a tradition of artists who understand eroticism as a form of world-making, not just image-making.
His inclusion in Inspiró Issue 3 feels like an ideal match. The magazine's third issue digs deeper into the territory it has staked out as its own: the intersection of sensuality, identity, and queer selfhood. The tone across its 108 pages, featuring twelve international artists working in photography, illustration, and mixed media, is both intimate and expansive, the kind of visual company that makes Berger's particular brand of cinematic desire land exactly as it should. His image La délicatesse (2023), visible in the issue's preview pages, captures something essential about his practice: tenderness and eroticism held in the same breath, neither swallowing the other.
Berger works from the conviction that beauty and freedom belong together, that an image can be accessible and strange at once, that the body is always already a fiction we are all collaborating on. At The Velvet Studio, that conviction generates photographs that feel genuinely alive: vivid in color, precise in atmosphere, and permanently open to interpretation.
Inspiró Issue 3 is available now from The Male Muse store. Explore more of Romain Berger's work at thevelvetstudio.fr and follow him on Instagram at @romainb_photos.
