Elmer Albert Batters (November 24, 1919 – June 25, 1997) was a pioneer fetish photographer. He made carefully framed pictures of women and kept the focus on stockings, legs, and feet. Decades before internet galleries made nylon easy to find, he used commercial erotic print to pull foot fetishism out of private taste and into public view. For adult readers who collect foot fetish work, and work adjacent to bondage, he is a foundational name in mid-twentieth-century leg art. The erotic eye is plain. It does not flinch. His models were adult women.
Batters was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On December 27, 1941, he enlisted in the United States Navy in Los Angeles and rose to Yeoman 1st Class. His service included the submarine tender USS Sperry (May–September 1942), the submarine USS Silversides (September 1942–April 1943), and USS Sunfish (April 1943–April 1944). That stretch of his life is mentioned briefly in The Lonely Sky, an out-of-print nonfiction book by test pilot William Bridgeman about the Navy’s experimental supersonic Skyrocket program in the 1950s.
He began by publishing his own photographs. In 1956 he founded and published Man’s Favorite Pastime, often called the first magazine devoted to leg art. From the early 1960s his pictures ran in Sheer Delight, Black Silk Stockings, Leg-O-Rama, Nylon Doubletake, and Tip Top. He cleared ground for later foot-fetish photographers who drew critical notice, Ed Fox and Johnny Jaan among them, and he helped turn a closeted sexual interest into erotic entertainment people would buy. Stockinged feet, high arches, and hose are the subject, not a leftover of pin-up framing.
One of his favorite fetish models was a Rubenesque woman named Caruschka. Little is known about her life outside the photographs, and Batters and his readers were stuck on her. Several shoots put her on a garden swing in the classic foot-fetish “Andalusian-fan” poses, high arches and well-shaped calves on display. Batters wrote that no girl in the history of his leg-art business had drawn so many admirers. He granted that she was heavier than the fashion ideal of the time, and he insisted that what hooked men was her charisma, her eyes, her eyebrow, and “that provocative smirk,” plus “a beautiful set of full shapely legs, firm and thrusting tits, and delicate, high-arch feet.” He claimed she loved men masturbating over her, and that the tease was deliberate. Decades before “body positivity” existed as marketing language, he was already selling desire for a fuller body and for feet shown straight on, and he stated the masturbatory contract between model and buyer without a euphemism.
Near the end of his life the German publisher Benedikt Taschen rediscovered him. Taschen’s circle met the work through Leg Show. Editor Dian Hanson introduced the photographs to a new generation of fetishists in the 1980s and 1990s. Taschen then published books of the pictures, including From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of the Hose and Legs That Dance to Elmer’s Tune (Taschen, 1998; ISBN 3-8228-8188-0). Original prints can now bring about $1,500 among fetish-art collectors, and Taschen still keeps him in its erotic photography list.
Batters sits at the hinge between mid-century underground leg magazines and the later glossy fetish revival. If stocking and sole photography is a kink lineage, his name belongs with the models, editors, and later photographers who made feet a primary erotic subject. The archive is not a bondage-hardware catalog. It is limb worship. It still feeds the same adult visual economy.
