Eric David Kroll (born October 23, 1946) is an American photojournalist, fetish photographer, erotica historian, and book editor. His career runs from 1970s New York magazine culture through Taschen’s 1990s fetish publishing boom to later curatorial work on Warhol’s Factory circle. For BDSM and fetish audiences he is best known for Fetish Girls and for editing landmark collections of Eric Stanton and other underground erotic artists—bridging reportage, glamour, and explicit kink photography without pretending they are the same job.
Photojournalism and the New York years
Kroll’s commercial work began in Taos, New Mexico in 1969, when he partnered with friend Sam Bruskin to open a gallery. From 1971 to 1994 he worked as a photojournalist in New York, moving through fashion, music, art, and film scenes at once. In the 1970s and 1980s he shot everyday life, celebrities, fashion, and social scenes for Elle, Vogue, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel. Subjects and circle contacts included Madonna, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and video artist Nam June Paik. In 1976, with a New York State Council on the Arts grant, he published Sex Objects, documenting sex workers across America. Artist Richard Prince later appropriated an image from that book into a work that sold for around two million dollars—proof that Kroll’s documentary erotic world had already entered the blue-chip appropriation economy.
Fetish Girls and the Taschen era
In the early 1980s Kroll turned from portrait journalism toward fetish subject matter; the book Fetish Girls (1994) remains one of the best-selling titles in Taschen’s history. He worked with Benedikt Taschen from 1993 to 2007 as photo editor and erotica historian. Beyond his own collections (Fetish Girls, Beauty Parade), he wrote introductions for influential projects such as the compiled two-volume Bizarre collection and various Taschen folios. His photographs openly nod to predecessors Weegee and Bunny Yeager as well as fetish illustrators Eric Stanton and John Willie, while conceptual influences include Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. That mix—street grit, pin-up craft, bizarre underground line art, and avant-garde citation—is the Kroll signature for collectors.
Curating Warhol and later books
Kroll curated Warhol: From Dylan to Duchamp, an exhibition of photographs documenting the Factory era. Contributing photographers included Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, actor Dennis Hopper, and others. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh loaned Firestone Gallery Warhol’s Screen Tests of Bob Dylan and Marcel Duchamp for the show. His own book list includes Sex Objects (Addison House, 1977), Fetish Girls (Taschen, 1994), Beauty Parade (Taschen, 1997), The Transformations of Gwen and Volume 2 (NBM, 2000–2001), Warhol: Dylan to Duchamp (Eric Firestone, 2010), and THE NEW YORK YEARS 1971 to 1994 (Timeless Edition, France, 2022). As editor he produced Taschen volumes such as The Art of Eric Stanton (1996), The Wonderful World of Bill Ward, King of the Glamour Girls (2003), and—with Dian Hanson—The New Erotic Photography (2007). Institutional collections holding his work include the USC Fisher Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the World Erotic Art Museum, the Greer Lankton Archives Museum, and the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. For adult-media readers, Eric Kroll is the photographer-editor who put fetish girls on the international art-book shelf and helped canonize Stanton, Ward, and the wider erotic-photography boom for a mass audience that still shops Taschen spines for kink history.
