One night I got a call from a Frenchman wanting to see the Betty Page prints. He came by limousine and bought several. From then on for many years he would arrive and buy--amassing a great collection. He even flew me to Paris on a book project. After dinner one evening at a fine Parisian restaurant I ordered creme caramel. As the dessert arrived at the table so did my friend's companion, a French actress, herself an icon. Was I dreaming? She and I discussed where best to buy vintage lingerie in the surrounding flea markets.
Becoming a professional photographer allowed me to shop for women's underwear. Old ladies in thrift stores still stare at me as I rummage through bins of bras and gloves and girdles. But I know where comes my income. Years ago a girlfriend put me through my tv stage but it had more to so with the redhead commanding me to do her bidding than what I was forced to wear before we fucked. My wife did model for David Hamilton for the infamous Bloomingdale's lingerie catalogue. My preference is to shop in obscure second hand stores from Auburn, Maine (Little Orphan Annie's) to Miami, Florida (Miami Twice) to along 4th Avenue in Tucson, Arizona to Julian's on 3rd Street in Los Angeles.
My girdle collection is infamous. Recently an aging transvestite in Honolulu sent me a novel videotape of his 700 girdles and bras panning his livingroom covered in vintage lingerie. He had a heart attack and was worried he might die leaving his wife to disperse of the delicacies. I bought the entire collection. It cost me $500 in shipping!!! (Note--I only sell the excess large-sized girdles and bras at studio visits.) I also bought his extensive tv literature collection. Lucky me.
I must backtrack. Shortly after moving to my new studio, I met in a neighborhood plastics store the porno actress/photographer Annie Sprinkle. When I gave her my card she exclaimed that "I base my photography on your work." (She was referring to my book, Sex Objects.) It turned out she lived a block from my studio (small erotic world). We became fast friends and I would visit her often meeting many of the greats in the sex business--Marco Vassi, writer, Veronica Vera, journalist and model for Mapplethorpe, Thomas Williams, beautiful black model, Mistress Antonette of Versatile Fashions, and Les Nichols, first female-to-male transsexual. Once Annie called all excited. She wanted me to come right over and bring my camera. I found Les, who had once been a woman who had had her tits amputated and a penis grafted over her vagina, and taken hormones to grow a mustache, DRESSED AS A WOMAN. Annie had transformed a man who had been a woman into a transvestite woman. Is that possible? Wild times. Deep friendship.
I started borrowing weird clothes from Annie. In the summer of 1987 my wife Lynka came to the, as yet, barren new studio. I placed a freshly painted white wooden stool in front of a sunlit white wall and asked her to model these strange new fetish items. A pair of six inch black patent leather high heels, a plain black leather eye binder, and an open-backed black leather panty. She sat with her legs encircling the lower stool supports and I asked her to bow her head submissively. I still print and exhibit this photo. The starkness of her flesh outlined in black leather remains riveting. Her submissive body language in the photograph continues to turn me on.
Pat Reshen, editor of High-Heeled Women and a friend of Annie Sprinkle's bought those shots and many early fetish photos of my wife. All of a sudden I was making money from something I loved, not liked. All of a sudden my photographs were being reprinted full page "bleed" instead of postage-sized, like in Vogue or in Der Spiegel magazine. At first I used a nom de plume--Eric Aperture, a veiled reference to Robert Downey's film Putney Swope co-starring a character named Mark Focus. I realized I liked what I was doing and wasn't ashamed and began insisting all photographs carry my name (an unusual practice in the hidden world of girlie photography).
Editors wanted to see different women. I started approaching women on the street. Seven years later I am still asked where I find my models. It is a constant search for Cinderella. To find the woman that fits the high heel, the silken white waist cincher, the black rubber hard phallus, the red checkered short raised skirt. One of the women I recently shot I met at the lab I use in San Francisco. She had dyed silver-blue hair and a crooked smile. The color photographs of her in an unbuttoned beige cashmere sweater, Kelly green skirt, white cotton underwear and blue hair are compelling.
One morning in April 1988 I was walking from my apartment at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 31st Street in Manhattan. I saw a punk blonde in a wacked business suit walking towards me. Split second decision--do I give her my card? No. There are many pretty blondes in the city of New York. Just then a truck driver from down the street whistled at her and I saw her smile. My kind of woman. Susan Smith came to the studio days later and I photographed her again and again. She lived in a SRO (single room occupancy) hotel two blocks away and we became involved. I told her then that the images we made would be bigger than she and I. That they would have a life of their own. Someone recently described her as Eric Kroll's Betty Page. Perhaps. There is a sadness to her, a soft sexuality similar to Marilyn Monroe. The photographs say more than I can say. I followed her through two boyfriends.
In the beginning I never photographed a woman with her legs spread apart. It seemed too intimate. I was embarrassed to look there. I was more interested in what covered the pussy then in showing the pussy lips. After years of shooting Susan I felt very comfortable with her entire body. I began taking more explicit photographs. There is one entitled "My Wife Thinks I'm Becoming A Pornographer" of Susan Smith naked with her legs apart wearing very high heels and looking directly into the camera, and if one looks closely, there is a dick in her--penetration from behind. No guy's face, just a nice sized dick. I rarely show guys in my photographs except me. I don't want my male audience to feel intimidated and no one is going to feel intimidated by my fat stomach and pretty face. Plus if I will pose in a compromising position then the model feels more comfortable doing the same.
In the 1970's when I did Sex Objects I documented women in the sex business. In the late '80's until the present I recreate what is in my imagination. I illustrate my obsession/fascination with sexuality. People ask what about the feminists? Many of the women I photograph over and over. Many times it is a collaboration. Sometimes the photographs are portraits of the person. Sometimes they are purely models playing out the roles I've asked them to play.
In the Fall of 1991 I had a one-man exhibition at the Neikrug Gallery of my erotic images. Dian Hanson, editor of Juggs and Leg Show came to the opening and later called asking to reprint shots of my wife pregnant in her magazine. That began a relationship that brought me to whatever recognition I have now. She noticed a shot I had done of Susan in a vintage girdle and suggested a layout in Leg Show of my girdle collection. Bingo. The response was enormous. She promoted me as she has done for many fetish artists like Bill Ward, Eric Stanton, Elmer Batter. The list is long. Thank you sweet Dian. She is the magnificent exception.
I've always taught a college-level photography course on social documentary photography since the mid 1970's. First for three years at the media center in Baltimore for Antioch College. Then at Hunter College. Then at the International Center of Photography and most recently at The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Teaching is a great source of inspiration and a source for models (and babysitters).
In 1984 my wife and I had our first child. I said I wouldn't photograph the birth, but I did one shot of Leah with only her head visible and the rest of her small body and umbilical cord still lodged inside Lynka with Lynka's lower body draped in white cloth. Both of their heads are being held by a pair of stranger's hands in the same manner. Leah has the same facial expressions today as she did the instant the doctors put her down and she screamed. Asian, dark & mysterious. Four years later in August we had Willa who has blue eyes and blonde hair. Go figure. (My mother was a blonde blue-eyed hat model). I sold the combined births to a Hearst magazine called Nine Months.
In 1991 on the advice of one of my mentors, Reb Stout, I made my first video, Girls From Girdleville, with my then partner Victor Trinceri. Shot in SVHS on the streets of New York the women wore girdles, bras, stockings, leather gloves, and high heels. It's become a classic of contemporary women in vintage lingerie. To make the sound track I found two Russian immigrants playing '50's jazz in Central Park and hired them to come to my studio, watch the video and lay down music instantaneously. I conducted by waving my hands frantically when I wanted more frantic jazz and more melodically when I wanted more mellow music.
Next came a two-part video on Susan Smith, my blonde leg model, doing exercises in Gramercy Park in a full length rubber catsuit, walking at night through a crowded Times Square in white hot pants and little else, and eating pizza in a pizza parlor in Greenport, Long Island, dressed only in a white knee-length spandex girdle. Scandalous (1992).
I was observing Annie Sprinkle turn herself into her product. Through manipulation of the media she was the event, etc. She was on HBO's Real Sex seen by millions across the country. It seemed like a good idea. I contacted HBO about my girdle obsession. They ignored me. I kept sending them articles on me or with my photographs and one day they said "yes." They asked me what my next video was going to be on and I made it up on the spot--ah Girdle Gulch. "Sounds great," they said. "Where is it going to be shot," they asked. Ah, "Arizona". Next thing I knew I was spending $20,000 to film a two-part video in the Arizona desert with women in vintage girdles surrounded by horses and water.
I listen to the letters I get from people asking for photographs of women smoking, women in lingerie in water, women putting on make-up, and women in bare feet on a gas pedal. I asked Alice, one of the three starlets of Girdle Gulch to bathe in her black girdle, creme-colored bra, and stockings. Then I asked her if she could suck her own toe. She smiled and soaped up her nylon clad toes and stuck her left foot in her mouth. "Stuck" is not the right word, "sucked" is better. I watched incredulously as she gave excellent "head" to her big toe...for ten long minutes. Soap oozing out of her mouth. She transfixed. Me transfixed. The camera getting it all.
I met Alice a year before I began Girdle Gulch in a local strip club in Flagstaff. I had gone there to see the silicone breasted Hollywood guest star but noticed this vixen with an S-curve to the shape of her back which made her ass into a weapon. She could ride bareback, arm-wrestle a guy, and shake her hips like a coiled rattlesnake. She was a star waiting to be discovered. Alice is fearless. I just visited her in April 1995 in a local cowboy bar. She was surrounded by men. She attracts them without lifting a finger.
I shot the Gulch footage in October 1992 and edited it into a series of vignettes nine months later. I find the model, I find the clothes, I find the location and make the story in the editing room. Two Vampire Lesbians Meet At Jackass Acres And Make-Out was constructed from a series of video shots that had nothing to do with what they became in the editing room.
One of the perks of doing fetish photography is that manufacturers give me stuff to use (free of charge) in my photographs. Consequently, besides the treasure trove of vintage lingerie, I also have collected six-inch ballet boots from Spartacus, six-inch red platform heels from Ritual Shoes in London, a black latex catsuit from Schwarze Mode in Berlin, fine leather corsets with a 20" waist from Dark Garden in San Francisco, lacy corsets from BR Creations in Mountain View, California, and a yellow rubber skater skirt from Syren in L.A. I like the smell of rubber. What can I say.
In the Spring of 1993 I started to record my photography sessions onto video. No one was behind the camera. I would set it on a tripod and let it run. The model and the photographer (me) would forget about it. It became a voyeur's wet dream. In the summer of 1994 I edited the first fifty hours of raw video into five tapes entitled The 118 East 28th Street room 301 NYC Fetish Tapes. The photographs I had taken in this 900 square foot studio were well known among a few thousand people. I wanted those same people to view the eroticism and humor that went into the making of those images. I remember how I would sometimes look up at Irving Klaw's old studio on 14th Street and dwell on moments that had existed there in the past. I wanted to give an exact location to where my photographs had been made. I figured by the time anyone came to 28th Street to knock on my studio door I'd be gone but the myth would continue...and it does (by the Bay).
Postscript
At around Christmas 1992 I started to receive letters from a publisher in Germany wanting to do a book of my photographs. At first I didn't believe him--Benedikt Taschen. But he persisted. I told him I didn't want to be strung along hoping the book would happen. He promised me I would have the book in hand a year after we signed the contract. A man of his word. By accident, by fate, the finest publisher of art books did my second book, Eric Kroll's Fetish Girls. If he hadn't been interested in images of women in rubber and leather--women in a commanding position and women in submissive posture--the book never would have been made.
I don't show my mother my book--I didn't make it for her. I show her the Taschen catalog of their books on the work of Georgia O'Keeffe, Salvador Dali, Duchamp and me. Huh. Is this a dream?
The dream gets better. Benedikt and I would spend hours over long cigars in dark bars in New York and Los Angeles discussing the world of fetish. I would bring up the work of artists and he would make notes. Months later we would get in a rented car and go meet these legends. After a while Mr. Taschen asked me to edit a series of books on the people I admire. So for the past several months I've spent afternoons rummaging through the personal archives of the great watercolor and pencil artist Eric Stanton--the King of women overpowering men--and the leg art photographs of Elmer Batters, who spent decades exploring with his camera from the "tip of the toes to the top of the hose."
Of course there are the photographs of the women that lined up in Europe for me to photograph after each book signing. And the beautiful blonde who wrote me asking to dress her in latex who worked by day modeling for young mother advertisements and, after meeting me, works at night dressed in rubber and heels disciplining naughty men. But that's the next CD-ROM.
