MADONNA - SEX

Artist: Madonna
Photographer: Steven Meisel
Creative Direction: Fabien Baron
Text: Glenn O’Brien
Publisher: Martin Secker & Warburg, London
Year: 1992
Edition: First Edition
Language: English
Format: Spiral-bound artist book with stamped aluminium boards
Dimensions: 35 × 28 cm
Pages: 124
Subject: Photography, Performance, Sexuality, Fashion, Popular Culture
Condition: Very Good. Light wear consistent with age; interior clean and well preserved.

Sex by Madonna is one of the most provocative and culturally significant artist books of the 1990s. Published in 1992, the publication extends Madonna's artistic practice beyond music and performance into the realm of photography, fashion, publishing, and the artist book, presenting an intentionally confrontational exploration of sexuality, fantasy, identity, desire, and power.

Photographed primarily by Steven Meisel, the book features Madonna alongside a cast of models, performers, and collaborators in a series of carefully staged scenarios. The images move between polished fashion photography, erotic imagery, performance, and constructed narrative, deliberately destabilizing the boundaries between commercial image-making and contemporary visual culture.

The project was developed in collaboration with Fabien Baron, whose art direction played an essential role in shaping its distinctive visual language, and writer Glenn O'Brien, whose contributions further connect the publication to the worlds of fashion, nightlife, and downtown New York culture. Together, the collaborators created a publication that operates simultaneously as photographic series, performance document, celebrity statement, and conceptual object.

Meisel's photographs emphasize theatricality and controlled artifice, combining the visual vocabulary of fashion editorial with more transgressive forms of staged photography. Madonna's persona becomes central to this construction, moving between roles and identities while deliberately questioning conventional representations of femininity, celebrity, and sexual power.

The book's imagery is closely connected to the atmosphere of early 1990s New York, drawing upon fashion, nightlife, performance, club culture, and queer visual languages. Rather than presenting sexuality as a purely private subject, Sex treats it as a form of public image-making and cultural performance.

The physical construction of the publication is inseparable from its conceptual impact. Bound with a spiral mechanism and stamped aluminium boards, the book was conceived as an object rather than a conventional photographic monograph. Its industrial, tactile construction reinforces the confrontational character of the images and positions the publication somewhere between artist book, fashion object, and pop-cultural artifact.

Upon its release, Sex generated widespread public debate surrounding censorship, obscenity, celebrity, artistic authorship, and the limits of mainstream publishing. Its deliberate confrontation with prevailing ideas about sexuality and popular representation made the publication an important document of the cultural tensions surrounding the early 1990s.

More than a celebrity photobook, Sex occupies a distinctive position at the intersection of music, photography, fashion, performance, and contemporary art. Its collaboration between Madonna, Meisel, Baron, and O'Brien resulted in an unusually integrated visual project in which the photographs, texts, graphic design, and physical object function as parts of a single work.

Today, the 1992 first edition remains an important and highly collectible document of 1990s visual culture, reflecting the period's increasingly fluid relationship between popular entertainment, fashion imagery, performance, and contemporary photographic practice.