Bob Carlos Clarke

Robert Carlos Clarke - who was born on June 24th, 1950, in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland - was an Irish photographer, who was best-known for his highly-stylized erotic images of women.  From a fading aristocratic family, and the son of Charles Carlos Clarke and his much-younger secretary Myra Dora Lynn, Clarke was sent to boarding school in England, which he hated.  On returning on one occasion from school to Ireland, he found his place in the family home had been usurped after his mother had given birth to a younger brother, Andrew.  Bob didn't like having a sibling rival, and would abuse his brother, including nailing him into a box and pushing him downhill.  (Andrew died of a heroin overdose in 2008.)  At the age of sixteen, Clarke broke up with a girl who had threatened to kill herself if he did so.  Clarke charmingly send her a letter containing a bullet and a note saying, "This one's on me."  After school, and a brief spell in Belfast, Clarke enrolled at Worthing College of Art in West Sussex in 1970.  Around this time, he began photographing nudes for "Gentleman's" Magazines.  Whilst at college, Clarke met Sue Frame, a part-time model; the pair married in 1975.  By 1975, he had enrolled at the London College of Printing, and that same year graduated with an M.A. in photography from the Royal College of Art.  Frame was Clarke's muse for nine years, but it was after only two years of marriage that Sue realised he was having an affair with Lindsey, who would become his second wife, as well as "dabbling" with other women.  Sue Frame claimed that Clarke said about her: "I will kill you first before you leave me."  Frame soon divorced Clarke and moved to South Africa, the two never meeting again.  In 1992, Lindsey gave birth to Clarke's only child, Scarlett, and Lindsey became his second wife in 1997.  Lindsey later described Carlos Clarke as, "amoral".  Carlos Clarke's career took off in 1980, when he produced the photographs for a book of Anais Nin's erotic stories, Delta of Venus.  A series of glossy coffee-table books followed through until the early 2000s, and he became renowned for his portraits of celebrities, as well as producing advertising campaigns for Levi's, Smirnoff, and Volkswagen.  In 1990, he produced a book, White Heat, featuring the then-largely-unknown chef Marco Pierre White looking like a rock star in his white-hot kitchens.  Apparently, in the late-1990s, Clarke began to become disillusioned with himself and his career.  He saw the recent innovation of digital photography as a threat to the skills he had spent decades honing.  By September of 2005, Clarke was behaving oddly.  His wife would often find he had gone missing from the flat they shared with their daughter; she sometimes found him sitting in his van, muttering darkly about suicide, and admitting, "I don't know what I'm doing."  In March of 2006, Lindsey persuaded Clarke to check into The Priory Clinic for psychiatric treatment.  After two weeks, he seemed to be improving.  However, on March 26th, 2006, Clarke walked out of The Priory, and took himself a mile to The White Hart Lane level-crossing, near Barnes, south-west London, where he threw himself under the passing 10.53 Windsor to Waterloo train.  Bob Carlos Clarke was 55 years old.