A lot of how BDSM learned to look at itself came through a handful of still photographers. The work runs from gallery photography to commercial glamour, from engineered restraint gear to ritual pain, and to documents of scenes that actually happened. The people in the pictures are adults.
Restraint engineering and glamour bondage
Jeff Gord (1946–2013) was a British photographer known for extreme bondage. He shot it, and through House of Gord he designed and built the restraint devices, mechanical work fitted to a body. Ken Marcus (born 1946) is not that kind of gear engineer. He shot glamour centerfolds and also made specialty bondage pictures.
Ritual pain and body modification
Fakir Musafar (1930–2018), an early figure in body modification, photographed piercing, suspension, and ritual pain. Suspension in that work carries the risk of falls, nerve compression, and blood flow being cut off.
Fashion, leather, and staged power
Helmut Newton (1920–2004) staged power in fashion pictures: heels and a dominant woman, a look that became a standard of glamour. Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989), an American fine-art photographer, shot flowers and celebrities and also the lines of gay leather and SM bodies. Eric Kroll (born 1946), an American fetish photographer, made explicit erotic pictures of fetish subjects.
What happened, and what was staged
Barbara Nitke (born 1950) stayed close to BDSM scenes and relationships that were actually underway, so the picture is a record of the relationship. Roy Stuart (born 1962) put fetish clothing together with staged domination in explicit erotic series that play as stories. Between the gallery, the glamour page, and the session document, these are some of the still-photo routes the culture used.
