Hi Ariel,

The Japanese certainly agree with the idea that bondage can be art. There is quite a lot of work that, despite having as its core a naked girl tied up, that is absolutely stunning. Whilst the rigging can be long-winded and highly reliant on supreme skill, there is no denying that the end product is a thing of beauty.

I’ve been wondering similar things to you over the last couple of years. I grew up on saturday morning cartoons, in particular the superb Inspector Gadget. Why do I like to see girls tied up? I present Penny Gadget as the sole evidence for the prosecution.

Penny got tied up and into peril a lot, but there’s no way we could call her predicaments porn. I’m a huge fan of classic damsel-in-distress imagery (as I mentioned in my introduction post ages back) and certainly when a girl gets into that sort of trouble in mainstream TV and film productions it’s not what would generally be considered porn.

It’s difficult to know where to ‘draw the line’ so to speak, especially as I’m not altogether convinced that there IS a hard line between ‘porn’ and ‘not porn’. At some level I suspect it depends on how much of the girl’s body is shown – especially her intimate areas – as well as the method or style of tie.

I used to be a member of a community dedicated to animated damsels in distress, the sort you found in the aforementioned saturday morning cartoons as well as from Japanese anime series and films. Artists at the forum would regularly produce works of bound girls from various sources, as well as posting screencaps and stories. The question of porn/not porn came up more than once, and one of the ‘policies’ enacted by the higher-ups was ‘no crotchropes’.

The ‘no crotchropes’ rule was an interesting one, as the use of one pushed an image or story over the line from ‘innocent but erotic fun with girls and ropes’ into ‘outright porn’ as far as the community at large was concerned. The addition of a crotchrope didn’t serve to immobilise the girl, and was only there to cause discomfort in the genital region. Needless to say, you didn’t see that in Inspector Gadget.

I think it heavily depnds on context and style as well. If we have a girl in a skirt and small top, bound hand and foot with just a couple of pieces of rope, and gagged with a handkerchief – AKA ‘Nancy Drew wannabe got caught snooping where she shouldn’t by the bad guys’ – we have a classic ‘damsel’ image. If she’s tied to a chair, or slumped against a wall, in some dingy basement-like setting, it’s a dramatic image of a girl in trouble, awaiting her rescuer if she can’t free herself. Makes for a good story, which is why it’s still used so often.

On the other hand, plonk her in a brightly-lit studio, having her pose suggestively in her ropes, thrusting out her breasts or posterior whilst looking at the camera with a sultry expression on her face, and we’ve got something far more erotic and closer to what we could consider ‘porn’. The girl hasn’t changed, the outfit is the same, she’s still tied the same way, but the context and style is different.

Ultimately, it’ll also come down to personal viewpoint. To some, a girl being photographed naked is art. To others, it’s nothing short of vile, horrific, pornographic filth.

RE nicely blurs the line between ‘art’ and ‘porn’, veering more to the latter in most cases. I’d love to do a site involving classic damsel scenarios, not just tie-ups, but traps and other perils or hazards. Things you’d find in a 1930s pulp adventure or a kid’s cartoon. Even then, in order to avoid any problems, it would still need to be classified as ‘adult material’ even though the subject matter isn’t ‘deliberately erotic’ so to speak.

I’ve waffled enough, but I think the bottom line is that it’s largely down to people’s interpretations and expectations. A girl in ropes or chains isn’t necessarily porn, but in presentation and style it can easily be viewed that way. Ultimately, one man – or woman’s – porn is another’s ‘meh, what of it?’

Hi,

Everyone seems to have their own definitions of “Art” and “Porn”. As far as internet photography goes, the usual definitions seem to be “anything I like” (art) and “anything I don’t like which might be even vaguely sexual” (porn) 🙂

I’ve always thought the most useful definitions are that a work of Art is anything designed to stimulate an emotion response in the viewer (or listener etc). This is a very broad definition, but it excludes things which are created purely to serve a function with no regard for aesthetics, and also excludes things designed to provoke intellectual responses (scientific papers, as opposed to a novel, say).

Pornography is anything designed to be sexually arousing to watch (or listen to, etc.)

Since I consider sexual arousal to be an emotional response, I consider all pornography to be a subclass of art. Some of it is very crude, heavy handed and unsubtle- that’s the sort that people usually label with the “porn” label. Some of it is beautiful and well made and well crafted and that’s what people usually label as “erotica” or “art”.

I’d consider something to be purely porn (and probably bad pure porn at that) if all it was designed to do was to provoke sexual arousal in the viewer, and the people who made it weren’t trying for anything else.

Amateur web cam screen grabs of a naked woman using a sex toys in a messy bedroom with no lighting and clutter and power cables visible on the floor behind her would count as cheap and nasty, bad porn to me, because the people involved have really made no effort to do anything beyond the bare minimum to provoke arousal. Point and click camera at a naked girl with no makeup in a grubby hotel room- probably bad porn. No skill, no vision, little attempt to be selective about how you depict what’s in front of the camera.

For me, anything which tries to do more than that definitely count as art as well as porn. The moment the creators try adding hairlights, tidying the clutter, deliberately selecting a shallow depth of field or make other artistic choices lift what they are doing beyond the realm of bad porn and into the realm of good porn (more usually called “art” 🙂 )

I’d say even just making material expressly designed to provoke lust and sexual arousal can be good art, if it achieves its aim and has been created with skill and care by people exercising choices to portray images in a certain way.

That’s how I hope Restrained Elegance can be seen- as good porn and hence also good art. It isn’t an accident that we shoot very pretty girls in elegant settings and glamorous bondage. It also isn’t an accident that they are almost always barefoot. It is designed to be arousing, and I hope it succeeds. A lot of work has gone into each photo. Many artistic choices- the choice of storyline, which model to book, where to shoot, what she should wear, how she should be tied, how the lights are set, what camera settings to use, how to photoshop and enhance the RAW image captures… all of these things interact with each other. It certainly isn’t a case of just pointing the camera at a naked girl and going “click”.

I also hope that it can be appreciated in some ways even by people who don’t find tied up girls directly visually arousing. I hope that the storylines we write to accompany each set might stimulate the imagination, both from doms thinking that they might be in charge of the scene and from subs who can picture themselves in the story. I hope that people who don’t “get” bondage at all will appreciate the artistry that has gone into the photos, and see that the pictures are aesthetically beautiful even if not their cup of tea. I also hope that it shows that Bondage doesn’t have to be about relentlessly black and grimy dungeons and industrial settings, the degradation of women or (worst of all) encourage disrespect or violence towards them.

I also hope that by sharing a bit of what we’ve learned about how to make pretty pictures in tutorials and discussions about cameras and techie things, rope tutorials and lexicons, we are helping foster a community and acceptance of BDSM as a sexual orientation rather than some sort of “disease of the mind” (which is how it used to be labelled). Not least for those people like Ariel and me who have been having these fantasies as long as we can remember and who would have been vastly reassured had we had RE as a resource back in our formative years.

Is RE porn? I really hope so. I really hope it is GOOD porn, well crafted and successful at stirring up some good sexual arousal- and also hope that it stimulates the imagination, and even the intellect a bit. Grandiose!! 🙂 🙂 🙂

To paraphrase the BBC’s mission statement:
To enrich people’s lives with photos, videos and features that arouse, inform, educate and entertain!

Hywel

@arielanderssen wrote:

Hi Everyone,

Sorry (as always) for being absent from the forum while I’ve been balancing a location trip for RE with my own shoots around the UK and further afield. I’m back for a week, and working for RE again; so I wanted to take the opportunity to post about something that I’ve been wondering about for ages.

A blogger friend of mine recently started a poll on her blog; ‘What do you want to see from spanking porn’. It was an interesting read, but it suddenly made me consider something that’s been in the back of my mind for ages. IS what we shoot porn?

Obviously, I know the answer is both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ for lots of reasons. I’m aware that to some people any photography involving nudity is pornographic, whatever its intention. And I’m also aware that all sorts of things can be used for porn even if the intention of the creator was something quite different (I’m thinking of lingerie catalogues for example)

Now from time to time, both Hywel and I do describe our work as ‘porn’, but for me at least, that’s sort of a defence mechanism. If I call my work porn before anyone else can, it seems to take the power out of a possibly pejorative term, and I can’t be accused of disingenuously describing our work as something non-sexual, when it clearly has a sexual component to it.

But in all honestly, I don’t really think of Restrained Elegance primarily as porn. For myself, my bondage work represents a few different things;-

Firstly, its a sort of retrospective message to myself, and people like me. If I’d seen a site like RE when I was much younger and confused about my sexual identity, I think I’d have found it very comforting. So I sort of hope that people who are similarly confused will stumble across RE and be comforted that there are other people like them, and that bondage doesn’t have to be grungy, or woman-hating, or incredibly sexually explicit.

Secondly, I suppose I hope that it gives people ideas. That feels quite important to me. I hope that some of the things we’ve shot for RE have made people go and try versions of the ties, or the stories, or just the concepts themselves. I hope it sometimes helps people to work out what their kink actually is, if they’ve not tried much bondage yet. I like the feeling of being in the business of putting ideas about bondage onto the internet.

Thirdly, I hope it does turn people on. I really do, that seems like a good and important thing to do (obviously, not as important as some other jobs, I do see perspective is important!). But I’m not sure if that on its own actually makes a product into porn. Lots of mainstream films make me feel kind of sexy, if only because of the well chosen score, beautiful people, and exciting dramatic action. And that doesn’t really make the movie itself into porn (or not ONLY porn, anyway).

Fourthly, the bits of RE I’m involved with have become a sort of artistic representation of my relationship with Hywel. Which might sound sort of odd, but I think its pretty unavoidable, for me at least 🙂

So that’s probably enough from me. I’d love to hear other peoples’ perspectives on the subject if anyone feels brave enough to share their opinions!

I’m not at all opposed to, or upset by, the idea that some people might think ‘Oh, of COURSE it’s porn, don’t be so pretentious’ And I’m absolutely sure that some people do use Restrained Elegance for porn, and not for anything else at all. Which is absolutely, totally fine of course. But I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who, like me, doesn’t really think that’s ALL it is.

I would certainly say this is not porn there is no sexual act and there is taste , humour and great thought in the storyline none of this is found in a pornographic shoot. Lightspear states on his site that there is no porn here just fetish bondage images i agree Masterminty