Fetish On Camera
We live in a luxurious era, and you should never forget it. There was a time you could go your entire life without seeing your kinky heart’s utmost desire — whatever that might be — unless you married lucky or had the means to patronize the very best sort of brothel. Long after the invention of the camera, the actual process of making dirty pictures — fetish or not — was expensive, difficult, and fraught with both legal peril and the risk of severe social sanction. Truly do we live in the age of miracles today! And by no means the least of these miracles is the ease and freedom with which any of us may touch our magic mirror smartphones and be instantly transported into a fantastic emporium of live sex cams starring an endless cornucopia of willing “mattress actress” performers.
In the early days of photography, cameras were heavy and bulky. Public morals (or at least a performative facsimile thereof) were strict. Clothing for women was layered and unrevealing. Getting a glimpse of what women were concealing under their layers of petticoats was restricted to the most contrived fantasies (a hot air ballooning mishap, perhaps?) and “comical” scenes like the photo postcard above, where a pretty woman reveals one shapely stocking-clad knee and calf to the bemused proprietor of a photographic studio.
It fascinates me that from the earliest days of photography, we saw photographers inserting themselves and their cameras into the risque stories they were telling and selling. No mere chroniclers, these fellows! No, it’s clear they saw themselves as — and indeed were — an essential part of the visual-erotic narratives that were their stock in trade. The automation of digital cameras may have collapsed the centrality of that role, but in the process the performer often becomes the photographer, and gains considerable erotic agency in the process. This, I would argue, makes producing and enjoying visual titillation more pleasurable for the performer and for the viewer alike.
I am endlessly fascinated by the series above, from the Ostra/Biederer studio in the Paris of a century ago. I like to assume that the photographer on the postcards is one of the legendary Biederer brothers, who between them have a strong claim to having pioneered (if not quite having invented) the field of commercial risque and fetish photography. One brother in the picture with a camera-as-prop and a pretty model willing to show it (and him) everything. Another brother off stage, standing in for us, watching with another camera, documenting the rich erotic life of a fetish photographer. It’s amazingly meta, and (to me at least) spectacularly satisfying.
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