Ann Magnuson, Marc Hom’s deliciously artificial photograph of a woman’s mysterious glance as she plays cards in a cocktail lounge, looks like an image taken by a time traveler, a souvenir from a tawdrily iconic past and future – the perfect snapshot of America and its inherent self-contradiction. Desire can be a game of teasing the senses, and here, as in Hom’s other photographs set in the world of casino life, it begins through the disjointed, banal appeal of driving a money Tardus through an intergalactic world of suggestive games and sex; it would be a nightmare to end up actually being these flat characters, yet it’s also perversely quite appetising. Everything within Hom’s frames is eerily stylised to be perfect, at once synthetic and natural, alluringly hyper-real yet also inviting in the ironic, domesticated wholesomeness of its elements – from the slightly out of focus fake plastic rock waterfall rolling behind the subject to the sharply bright kitsch of the cocktail in the foreground, it’s a familiar sort of ersatz we are offered, impudently old-fashioned, comforting. Likewise in the disproportionate, childlike immensity of the slot-machine wall – this is excess but as well-known as a pile of shiny frosted cupcakes. I know this atmosphere well. I actually am not that complicated – one vodka martini and everyone is desirable! Two vodka martinis and I’m not too desirable.

I sometimes travel to Vegas and am familiar with a similar sense of desired infinite possibility in the hotels; surrounded by all the slot machines, it’s as if everyone is on their way to a football match, in the rush of being late for kick off, gamblers thriving on oxygen pumped in to maintain their alertness, no sense of fear at running out of money or lovers in this orgiastic space where time seems to be suspended and people are somehow neither dead nor truly alive. In their thrill seeking, what each is after is unknowable, but their desires are being controlled, unreal but familiar at the same time. It is this tug of war, this duality between desiring and being compelled to desire, which is embodied in Marc Hom’s photographs. Last year I attended the opening of ‘Love’ in Vegas, the Beatles’ and Cirque du Soleil spectacle. It was a fine show and afterwards, there was a huge party and a lot of chaos. Olivia Harrison had kindly flown my wife and I from LA to Vegas along with an interesting group of people, including Ravi Shankhar! It was a huge event and there were scantily clad hostesses everywhere in the casinos and restaurants, but the sexiest sight was spotting Yoko Ono in a white wide brimmed hat, a sharp white suit and a mile wide smile. At 72 years of age, she was by far the most desirable female on the strip! I wish Marc had been there to capture Yoko in her outfit against the poker tables; I would buy that photo in a flash! It would have been like looking at someone else’s secret fantasies, realising the way their desire drives their imagination can be mysteriously constructed and controlled by a game of familiar imagery.

Hom’s photographs may tap into the pure, unflinchingly confessional theme driving the artist, of an imagination constantly refined and reined in by the self. Whether it be in his highly stylized compositions or the simple ambiguity of a humble, auto-fetishistic self-portrait in disguise, the tone here is not too far from what I have encountered in my work within an industry as identified with desire as there is. I co-own an erotic emporium called Coco De Mer, a place where people are not only able to obtain reified desire but where they can also explore various non-material ways of expressing their wants in an endlessly individualized, original way – we invite people to send us their desires via e-mail. Some of these messages have become short films, and now visitors to our LA shop may record their desires directly into a microphone in my workspace, named Mr Permission’s Office, a term echoing some of the feeling of control I feel is inherent to desire’s backbone. Whether it be ‘having rough sex on a washing machine’ or getting off on the idea of ‘gently stroking a real goat,’ the range of real fantasies in our archives reflects a spectrum of possibility and choice lurking behind everything, the participants’ dipping into a figurative Las Vegas of the everyday encompassing everything from politics to architecture, full of erotic pulse and a lurking, throbbing sensuality. That Las Vegas doesn’t actually exist anymore, but its idea can still trigger the imagination, drive endless self-controlled fantasies of what could be.

Here is one of mine: I would love one of Hom’s photographs to hang in my living room wall, to be visually juxtaposed to the view out to my garden – the artificial neon light from his slot machine stage and Ann Magnuson’s majestically flowing green dress perfectly joining in the natural environment. This uncannily chaste search for a controlled desire is generated and controlled by the contradictions of a shamelessly familiar object – itself.