It's almost impossible to convey the importance, impact and place in the history of fetish publishing of Bizarre, the brainchild and private passion of Singapore Born John Alexander Coutts aka John Willie. His contribution and the quality of his work is amongst the most respected in the genre, obscured by his reclusiveness and the clandestine nature of his published output, which until some years after his death remained an exclusively underground phenomenon. Willie acted not only as editor, but also took almost all of the photographs (many featuring his wife Holly Anna Faram) and drew all of the illustrations. He sold Bizarre in 1956 and moved to Los Angeles where he continued his photographic work until he suffered a brain tumour after which he destroyed his work and archive and moved to England until his death in 1962. His combination of talent and inclination are quite unique and quite distinct from his peers, and his style seems to have accidentally become part of a common cultural lexicon, so much so that when classic fetish is referenced in a modern context, it almost always looks as if it was heavily influenced by the hand of Willie Himself.
