Eric Kroll: Fetish Girls, Sex Objects, and the Taschen Years

Eric David Kroll, born October 23, 1946, is an American photojournalist, fetish photographer, erotica historian, and book editor. The career runs from New York magazine culture in the 1970s, through the fetish publishing boom at Taschen in the 1990s, to later exhibitions of photographs from Andy Warhol’s Factory years. For readers in BDSM and fetish, the name usually means Fetish Girls, and the collections he edited of Eric Stanton and other underground erotic artists. Reportage, glamour, and explicit kink photography sit next to each other in the work. They are not the same job.

Commercial photography started in Taos, New Mexico, in 1969, when he and his friend Sam Bruskin opened a gallery together. From 1971 to 1994 he was a photojournalist based in New York, moving through fashion, music, art, and film 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. The circle of subjects and contacts included Madonna, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and the video artist Nam June Paik. In 1976, with a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, he published Sex Objects, a document of sex workers across America. Artist Richard Prince later appropriated an image from that book. The work it went into sold for around two million dollars.

Fetish Girls and the people he cites

In the early 1980s Kroll turned from portrait journalism to fetish subject matter. Fetish Girls, published in 1994, remains one of the best-selling titles in Taschen’s history. From 1993 to 2007 he worked closely with Benedikt Taschen as photo editor and erotica historian. Besides his own collections, Fetish Girls and Beauty Parade, he wrote introductions for influential projects, including the compiled two-volume Bizarre and various Taschen folios. The photographs nod to Weegee and Bunny Yeager, and to the fetish illustrators Eric Stanton and John Willie. On the conceptual side the cited influences are Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

He curated Warhol: From Dylan to Duchamp, an exhibition of photographs documenting the Factory era. Photographers in the show included Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Cecil Beaton, and the actor Dennis Hopper, among others. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh loaned Firestone Gallery Warhol’s Screen Tests of Bob Dylan and Marcel Duchamp for the exhibition.

Books, editing, and where the prints went

His own books include Sex Objects (Addison House, 1977), Fetish Girls (Taschen, 1994), Beauty Parade (Taschen, 1997), The Transformations of Gwen and its second volume (NBM, 2000 to 2001), Warhol: Dylan to Duchamp (Eric Firestone, 2010), and THE NEW YORK YEARS 1971 to 1994 (Timeless Edition, France, 2022). As editor he worked on Taschen volumes including The Art of Eric Stanton (1996), The Wonderful World of Bill Ward and King of the Glamour Girls (2003), and, with Dian Hanson, The New Erotic Photography (2007). Institutions holding the 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.