Hi All,
This is a reply in the on-going conversation with @bandreesub that started on Twitter. See earlier posts here and here.
The first bondage shoot I did was with a lifestyle BDSM couple who ran one of the very earliest British bondage sites. I remember the male/top/photographer explaining that what he found sexy was the SITUATION. The way in which she was tied, the loss of her freedom, the pain she was experiencing. That the identity of the submissive was at best secondary to the situation in which she found herself.
This was very useful for me because it triggered the realisation that what I wanted to do was the absolute opposite. For me, the identity of the submissive was the critical thing. I didn’t want to make photos of any old person tied up- I wanted it to be the duchess, the princess, the movie star, Ashley Renee or Andrea Neal.
I know of course that those people are fictional- even Ashley Renee or Andrea Neal is only the stage name or scene persona of the real person. But that’s fine. I’m a romantic at heart. My work is romantic fiction.
So I care more about the story and the identity and personality of the submissive in the romantic fantasy world that I do about realism. I care more about making sure the model looks at her best in bondage than portraying her ordeal.
My approach opens my work up to the charge of being “Bondage Lite”. It’s true that we avoid completely immobilising the model, because then she can’t pose or find different poses, and can’t generate the 40+ photos customers demand of a website update. (Unlike buying a single dramatic photo for your wall, for example).
We also use masks and blindfolds sparingly because the eyes are the windows of the soul and eyes are powerful tools in an actress’ storytelling arsenal.
Other sites clearly emphasise the situation over the person. A lot of stuff produced by Kink.com, for example, or House of Gord. Not that they aren’t crediting the models – just that the most important thing is what’s happening to her, not who she is.
That’s great, if that’s your preference. It doesn’t happen to be mine – I don’t want to feel that the girl is in any way interchangeable. Because in my head she’s the Princess or the Pirate Queen or the Winter Witch or the vicious CEO getting her comeuppance. Identity trumps situation, for me.
What sometimes does annoy me is to take it a step further and say that because we’ve done everything in our power to romanticise the photos, choosing bondage positions that flatter the model’s figure and work with how she poses best, lit as beautifully as we can, in a romantic setting… that the bondage is somehow fake. Not real. Maybe lacks conviction, as @bandreesub says. That, I must take issue with.
It’s a real girl, and she’s really tied up, and she’ll really have rope marks to show for it, and that’s a real ball-gag, and it’s just as hard for her to cope with as it would be for anyone else. They might make it look easy, but it isn’t. It’s as real as any other bondage photo that was created for art… and anything more real was probably a criminal act, not something we should consider.
We won’t tie a reverse prayer or an elbows-together tie on someone who finds it borderline impossible to hold. So you will see those ties done repeatedly with models with narrower shoulders and longer arms, where girls with broader shoulders will get tied in box much more often. It looks better on them and it is safer to tie. Even in the relatively narrow range of body shapes we shoot, there are massive variations.
There is a reverse prejudice that one also hears fairly commonly in the media and online as a reaction to the ridiculous over-representation of particular body types in fashion, porn or commercial modelling… that something is for “REAL women”.
I get where this is coming from, I really do. The fashion industry in particular is grotesque in its narrow-minded pursuit of a single, extreme body type.
But saying that the women in the shots aren’t REAL is not fair either. They are real people, they get real back ache and real knee problems and get every bit as upset when people say horrible things to them as anyone else does.
My wife is a professional model and she’s every bit as real as any other person. Her physical type is closer to some of the ones commonly used for commercial work- although actually she’s too tall for fashion and nothing from the high street fits her. Waists are always under her bust and there’s no such thing as an ankle-length skirt, jeans that come down to her shoes or full-length sleeves.
My previous partner is very outdoorsy and slim, but quite short with a long back and short legs and nothing ever fits her either.
So one might imagine looking at them that fashions would be exactly for the likes of them- but it turns out, not so much. What I think we really need here is not just a broadening of the range of body shapes fashion companies use in their advertising, but also a broadening of the range of body shapes they actually make clothes for.
Here I would say the bondage world is actually in a better state than the fashion industry. If what you want to buy is bondage gear, you can get it in a wide variety of styles and sizes. Actually the main issue we have is getting bondage gear small enough to fit- we invariably have to punch extra holes in straps. But even so, custom-made equipment is readily available, and much closer in cost to the off-the-peg versions than is the case with mainstream fashion.
To return to @bandreesub’s point, I would say that the bondage equipment manufacturers do a good job of catering to all shapes and sizes. I think that’s because all shapes and sizes actually buy bondage gear to use, so they have to.
What is demonstrably not so well covered is portraying that wide variety of body shapes in bondage photography. Clearly, for female submissive imagery, the overwhelming majority of images one encounters browsing random bondage photos for free feature models who are dress size 8-14 women under the age of 40.
It’s better than fashion photography. There are sites out there featuring a wider range of shapes and sizes, and amateurs of Fetlife feature a wider variety too. But yes, if you google Bondage Photography what comes up is a bunch of dress size 8-14 girls under the age of 40. My strong suspicion remains that this is just what the people who are willing to actually PAY for bondage photos will pay to see.
It’s not meant to be exclusionary. It’s unfortunate that people feel excluded by it. But it is a by-product of who is willing to pay to make the art- it’s the market at work. Long ago people discovered that to sell magazines to men, put a pretty young woman on the cover. To sell to women… put a pretty young woman on the cover. It is possible, certainly, to buck the trend. Magazines with steam trains on the cover do sell. (But allegedly not as well as they used to sell when they had pretty girls and steam trains on the cover).
So it comes back to the point about paying for art. Breaking it down, @badreesub wants something pretty but not too pretty, realistic but not amateurish, well-lit but not so well lit as to become too perfect, not too graphic, and featuring a model who will make her feel like the bondage is for the likes of her. Evocative of the intensity of the moment but not overproduced (to her tastes).
I think one will agree that’s quite a specific set of requirements. So I’d again encourage anyone who finds their artistic needs not currently being served to reach out and commission someone to bring your vision to life with you, or take up the camera and make some yourself. I think it could be absolutely splendid, and might broaden consumer’s horizons and mean there will be more of it around. Someone has to be the pioneer.
I’d still be happy to give it a go, but suspect that the critical difference between the focus on the girl, or the focus on her situation, makes my work the antithesis of what @bandreesub is looking for.
Parenthetically not all of my ideas are terribly commercial either- Georgian ladies always bombs horribly (apparently Jane Austen fans are not bondage buyers, who knew?), historical stuff in general doesn’t go down so well, and where I have ideas I have to moderate it to the commercial realities and shoot with models who will sell rather than the actress I’d ideally cast for each role, given that we have to produce 5-8 sets every day we shoot. So I do them, but compromise on them.
Cheers, Hywel
I find my own position here to be betwixt and between. On the one hand, I do appreciate the romanticism and glamour of Hywel’s images. On the other hand, I’m only mildly interested in the fictional backstory, and much more focused on the current situation that the model (or the model’s character) is in. Which may include something about why she’s currently helpless, but definitely must include that she is bound and helpless.
And on the gripping hand, I have this most sincere allergy to sadism.
“Bondage lite” may be only an incidental byproduct of the RE style from Hywel’s POV, but it’s an essential feature from mine. And even among RE photosets, I find myself shying away from the darker stuff. Even something like a reverse prayer, that only looks like it might be uncomfortable, sets my teeth on edge. What I want to see are models who are excitingly helpless and helplessly excited; happy in comfy bondage, but with escape not being an option. Where the models are vulnerable, but where that vulnerability is NOT going to be used to make them hurt.
So there’s a big overlap between my preferences and the RE style. Partly because I do share something of Hywel’s romanticism, partly because I share some of his other preferences (bare feet!), and partly our differences fortuitously do have us coming to the same place for different reasons. In any case, it’s a big enough overlap that I’ve been a RE member more or less continuously since the site started.
Now the place where I get the feeling of “this ‘bondage’ stuff is not for the likes of me” is in stories and drawings. Photos and video are constrained by the limitations of the flesh-and-blood models. Fiction and artwork don’t have that limitation, and it often seems to me that every writer and artist out there is taking advantage of this to indulge in the sort of harshness and cruelty toward their fictional captives that I’m so allergic to. Sometimes it seems so pervasive that it’s become invisible to everyone else.
Every so often I’d ask “can anyone recommend any ‘bondage’ stories that aren’t ‘BDSM’ stories? That go light on any D/s and leave off the SM?” In response, I’d get recommendations for stuff that was full of lavish descriptions for teh sexy about how uncomfortable the bondage was and how much pain the captive was suffering. And when I’d point this out… It made me feel like that character in the Monty Python sketch who was offered spam spam spam eggs and spam – “it only has a little spam in it.”
So I ended up doing what Hywel has suggested here: Drawing and writing my own stuff. And hoping that my stories, at least, will find an untapped market. (Plug: I’ve got my drawings, photos, short stories, and samples of my e-novels on http://www.sablesword.com/ )
PS WRT getting bondage gear that’s small enough to fit, “me too.” I’ve often found myself using leather wrist-cuffs on the models’ ankles, and I’ve had a custom set of “extra small” wrist-cuffs made for those models with extra tiny wrists.
I tend to agree with sablesword. Probably the most important aspect of bondage photography to me is that the captive *enjoys it* (or is at least portrayed as enjoying it). And yes, it must be tight and inescapable, yet also reasonably comfortable.
This is probably why Jeff Gord’s stuff *did* appeal to me. If you just saw some of his stills out of context, they could easily look extreme and yes, objectifying. He openly said so himself. But his models had (stage) names that he’d use frequently. He took their safety and well-being extremely seriously, and most of his video clips showed them having orgasms. He always interviewed them afterward to find out what worked and what didn’t, and sometimes they were just too floaty or dreamy to answer coherently for a while.
So once I understood his style, I saw his work in a completely different and much more positive way. It almost makes me guilty to look at bondage in which the subject *doesn’t* get that kind of reward for her struggles.
I think you hit the nail on the head, if you don’t like what is commercially available there are a number of models who are willing to do custom shoots and then you can get exactly what you want. I like that Restrained Elegance has a certain style and appreciate that people have other preferences but there are so many sites, that between RE and a few others, I get everything I want.