Bondage In The Darkroom
This strikes my eye as an early example of the fun we have these days with photoshop. It’s a nice tame studio bondage picture that was carefully cut and pasted in the darkroom over a scenic background, to make a nice “tied in the ruins” damsel-in-distress postcard. Or so it appears to me:
That’s a cool pic! Terrible bondage, but a fun pic!
The bondage IS terrible. It looks like something she devised herself, something suggestive that she thought would appeal to the subconscious desires of whatever male enters her room in this bordello.
She looks as though she hears footsteps. Or perhaps the turn of the doorknob. She expects that her cowboy customer will sweep her off her feet and into the brass bed. But more likely, the guy will shake his head at that sorry excuse of ropework, and fasten her tightly to the post to show her how it’s done right.
And if she protests, then comes the gag made from his neckerchief so she can watch in silence as he heats the rowels of his spurs in the flame of the gaslight.
In my eyes this doesn’t look like a cut & paste job in the darkroom, more like the photographer used a painted studio background.
Back in 2007, I stumbled upon a set of 19th century bondage photos made by french hobbyist Charles Francois Jeandel. Compared to the picture above, he took his ropework a lot more serious. The Musee d’Orsay has quite a few examples on its website (If the link works: The fun begins around page 4) which show most of the bondage positions which are canonical up to this day.