It turns out that if you ask nicely, photographers are as willing as authors or anyone else to show off their work, so all those questionable practices about using other people’s images without their permission are really pointless, because it’s nearly as easy to do it the fair and legal way.

To thank our photographers for being such amenable and all-around decent people, we’re starting a new Photographer Profile feature where the photographers who have kindly let us use some of their images can introduce themselves to the Coffee and Porn crew. Today’s photographer is James Spada! Brace yourselves, there’s a lot of candy below the cut, and not much of it is SFW.

As an author, James Spada has written New York Times bestselling biographies of Princess Grace, Peter Lawford, and John & Caroline Kennedy, among many others. As a photographer, he has become renowned for his erotically-charged, artistic depictions of the male nude. His sixth book of photographs, Quinn, is the first to feature a single model. Spada first happened upon Quinn Christopher Jaxon, a twenty-two-year-old gymnast, dancer, actor and model, on the Model Mayhem website. “Once I saw the results of our first shoot,” Spada says, “I knew that Quinn would be a model I’d want to shoot as often as he’d let me…Quinn has become a Muse for me.”

The two have had photoshoots in Spada’s Sherman Oaks, CA studio, in a small West Hollywood resort, in a 50s beauty-parlor themed bar in Hollywood, and an elaborately decorated studio in downtown Los Angeles. Spada finds Quinn a joy to work with. “He’s energetic, amenable to just about every suggestion, cheerful and always making jokes. Once when I was shooting him with an erection from below, I commented that his penis looked like a tower. ‘You’d better hurry up,’ he said without missing a bit, ‘or it’ll be a leaning tower.’”

 Quinn dances in clubs in Hollywood in front of appreciative women and gay men. Sorry ladies, but he’s engaged to a girl back in his hometown in North Dakota. He’s become so successful in Hollywood though–his first film, E Ticket, has just completed filming–that the young lady will probably have to follow him to Tinseltown.

“Quinn” is available for purchase at Blurb.

See more of James Spada’s photographs of Quinn and other beautiful young men, and learn how to purchase his books and prints of his photos, by visiting his website: www.spadaphoto.com