Steve Shaw left school at fifteen to make tea in a Manchester photography studio. He swept floors, worked overtime unpaid, and learned how cameras work by watching other people use them. He shot aerial photographs from small planes, moved to California, and landed at a Glamour Shots in a Santa Ana mall before working his way into the pages of Vogue, Elle, and British Esquire. By the time he had spent two decades photographing celebrities and models for the world's biggest magazines, Shaw was exhausted — not by the work, but by the restrictions. Art directors who picked the worst frames. Layouts that shrank images onto cheap paper. Publicists insisting on showing precisely one inch below the bum crack. In 2011, he sold his Venice Beach home to Robert Downey Jr., took the $600,000, and launched treats! from a small office on La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.
The premise was straightforward: give the world's best photographers a luxury print magazine with total creative freedom, no advertising constraints, and paper stock worth touching. The first issue debuted during Oscar week at the James Goldstein residence. Jason Statham was in the inaugural pages. Media Industry Newsletter named it the hottest magazine launch of the year — the first publication featuring nudity ever to receive that honour, beating out 840 other new titles. Within a year, photographers like Brett Ratner, Mark Seliger, Tony Duran, and Ben Watts were volunteering to shoot for the magazine without fee. Then came Emily Ratajkowski: a nineteen-year-old with a thin portfolio who sat unnoticed at a casting in Shaw's studio until he started talking to her. The resulting photographs led Robin Thicke to cast her in the "Blurred Lines" video, which became the biggest song of 2013.
Thirteen issues over more than a decade, each one printed like a collector's item on heavy stock with no advertisements — treats! positioned itself in the space between fashion photography and fine art, with a particular focus on the female form presented through the lens of creative expression rather than commercial transaction. The magazine threw legendary parties in Los Angeles, drew a Hollywood orbit of attendees from Leonardo DiCaprio to Jennifer Lawrence, and survived a seven-year legal battle with investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Shaw's latest project, a 360-page retrospective book titled Bares It All, hand-bound and slipcased, reads like both a monument to the magazine and a survival story about independent publishing in the age of disposable content.
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