Sheree Rose: Photographer, Domme, and Bob Flanagan’s Partner in SM Art

Sheree Rose is an American photographer and performance artist, born in 1941. She grew up in a Jewish family in Los Angeles. Early on she and her first husband both worked as teachers. After the divorce in the 1970s she earned a master’s degree at California State University, Northridge, then moved into socialist feminism, consciousness-raising groups, and punk. For Rose, photography was how she entered those worlds, not how she watched them from the curb. As a primary photographer at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, Los Angeles, she shot Exene Cervenka and John Doe of the band X, and writers Dennis Cooper, Ed Smith, Amy Gerstler, and David Trinidad.

In 1980 Rose met the performance artist Bob Flanagan. The relationship was more than a romance. They were artistic partners until his death in 1996. For the two of them, sadomasochism was not a side hobby. It was the center of how they lived and how they made work. Through the 1980s they organized and advocated inside BDSM community life, including founding the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Janus, one of the early U.S. groups devoted to consensual SM education and social life. Rose photographed their life and practice at length. She also photographed other performance artists, including Genesis P-Orridge for the RE/Search book Modern Primitives, and Ron Athey.

Their formal performance work began in 1989 with Nailed, the same year Modern Primitives was published. The themes were BDSM, sex, and death, and specifically how Flanagan lived with cystic fibrosis. In 1992 their touring exhibition Visiting Hours opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and traveled widely. It mixed text, video, and live performance, and it set illness next to SM: the look of a hospital, masochistic endurance, and the ethics of looking at a body that is sick and also wants pain. That life was also recorded in the 1997 film Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. The archives are held at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in the libraries of the University of Southern California.

After Flanagan’s death in 1996, Rose kept using the camera on masochism and art. From 2011 she collaborated with the British performance artist Martin O’Brien, who also has cystic fibrosis. The work keeps BDSM and medical reality in the same frame instead of splitting erotic masochism off from illness. The pain and the power exchange in these pieces are art and daily life between adults who have agreed to it. They are not medical advice, and they are not a lesson in how to damage a body.