[Warning:  Some viewers may find the sexual explicitness of some photos in the New York Raw series offensive or inappropriate.]

These aren’t garden-variety photographs.  Nor are they glimpses of the chic and well-placed.  This is something else.  Sado-masochism (known also as fetishism or bondage & discipline) has always inhabited the shadows, whatever the culture.  Its practicalities are not a subject of polite conversation.  And as a proclivity it doesn’t go away.  It’s not a trend but an urge.  How we respond to images like these tells us something about ourselves, our fantasies, our fears.

The years 1999-2005 arguably marked a high point of the fetish scene in America and Europe, with numerous venues opening on a weekly or monthly basis to cater to its needs.  (Concurrently, its themes were widely taken up by the fashion and advertising industries.)  New York was the scene’s epicenter in the U.S.  As the London-based Skin Two magazine’s New York photographer, I was allowed to photograph in some of the clubs; that led to invitations to shoot at private parties.  At the time, Skin Two was the premier international publication of fetish fashion and events.  Within the venues I also pursued my own art, depicting the happenings in their fullness in a largely non-documentary approach.  My aim was to show the range of interests the scene attracted while doing character studies of some of its participants.  Inevitably, “New York Raw” prompts questions about the nature of human relationships and the various routes we all travel in search of pleasure.

I was an observer (as photographers must be) but not a passive one.  Although not a player, I interacted.  Often that meant gaining acceptance — in whatever way possible — so I could roll with the momentum at play.  If people I didn’t know caught my attention, I might simply step back, avoid intrusiveness, practice the virtues of patience and respect, and hope for an implicit OK; then I’d wait for the moment of a photograph.  When working for Skin Two on any particular night, I tried to get what they wanted as early as I could and then went in search of the real and the beautiful.  That is, the visually striking certainly but also the genuine, the unaffected, not shaped by consumerism or other peer pressures, what came up from the emotional depths and helped define a self-determined personality.  I wanted to push and pull my art.  I roamed around with a ready eye, welcoming luck. I felt privileged to have entry into that world.  Though I lived for the present I wanted as well to enshrine the moment and its risk-takers for posterity.

Toward what do our childhoods develop and mature?  What impels the direction of our secret selves?  Do we ever really know?  There are always unanswered questions, and these shape us as much as what we come to know.

Mostly, we’re left with circumstantial evidence.  I’d been living in New York, in Greenwich Village, for more than a dozen years, in the general neighborhood of the gay S&M establishments that Mapplethorpe sought out.  Not being gay, I hadn’t been drawn to that scene.  Plus there was already enough on my plate.  Throughout most of New York’s high-crime ’80s I drove a cab — in the hope of having free time to pursue my own art (which was then writing), but night-shift hacking became so problematic I bailed out to the nine-to-five world, taking a journalism job in — of all places — the press office of a Christian denomination’s national headquarters.  Then one day I saw an intriguing little ad on the back page of the Village Voice newspaper, mentioning The Eulenspiegel Society, the country’s oldest and largest fetish group.

So I took in a TES meeting and within minutes ran into a fellow employee from the church center.  We were both a bit shocked.  It turned out he was the founder of TES.  A small world.

A year later, after changing jobs, I went one Friday evening to a Brooklyn gallery opening of photographs by Charles Gatewood, who’d begun documenting part of the S&M world some years earlier.  I struck up a conversation with Gatewood, telling him I’d recently gotten back to photography after a decade’s absence.  He told me that later that night he was going to Click ‘N Drag, a kind of dance club oriented around S&M themes.  It was right in my neighborhood and he suggested I grab my camera and drop by.  He said I wouldn’t have any problems shooting as long as I just acted like I belonged there.

During the ensuing months I regularly got into my leathers and photographed at Click ‘N Drag.  I also kept dropping in at TES and, whenever possible, took people there out for drinks in exchange for hearing in detail about their interests.  I went from boots to a dominatrix into medical scenes to whips, riding crops, canes and paddles to a woman who had a dungeon of her own in her Brooklyn basement.  I commiserated with another woman dom who’d just inherited scores of ornate and colorful floggers from an elderly male only to find that her lust had been seriously stymied because none of her submissives could come up with the right cut of black underpants to really excite her.

On a trip to London, I showed some of my photos to Tony Mitchell at Skin Two.  He liked what he saw, said they needed a photographer to cover New York fetish events, asked if I was interested.  I jumped at the opportunity.

What attracted me to that world?  Or would it be more accurate to assume that, however indirectly, I sought it out?  Sexuality played a role but that was just part of the appeal.  I’d long been attracted to outsiders, people who lived on the edge, who played outside the rules, who took chances as a means of exploring their inner selves.

S&M activity encompasses a wide range of play and diversity of players, so generalizations are likely to be off the mark.  Some of what I saw was quite harmless, like spanking – which can be exploratory and sensual; while some of the play bordered on the criminal (if it were not for voluntary association).  Central to it all was trust and a primal communication between the dom and sub amid their drive toward heightened sensation and pushed limits.  To my mind, it was the sub who was taking the bigger leap into the unknown, reaching out for “subspace”, that zone of exhaustion and ecstasy that pain could induce.  Doms laid out the route, some more skillfully than others.  It was all S&M, or sex and magic, as Mapplethorpe liked to say.

The basic couplings themselves didn’t differ from those found in general society.  There existed the same romances, casual affairs, infidelities, life-long commitments, one-scene stands, marriages, jealousies, gay or straight or bi pairings, broken hearts and lonely hearts.  These were, after all, those everyday next-door neighbors whose secret lives you never suspected.

Owning an expensive camera and photographing for a “big” magazine didn’t give me carte blanche.  Some organizations, including TES, didn’t allow photography at their play events.  TES was, like a few other groups, a membership-supported organization and it was protective of its members’ anonymity.  In not a few cases, being exposed or coming out as a fetishist could put your job in jeopardy.

Even when I had authorization to work events, I’d back off when people declined to be photographed.  There were instances when male executives of prominent corporations would make frantic morning-after phone calls to circulate their plea that I not submit for publication some photos I’d taken, seemingly with their OK, as they’d been whipped while dressed in nylons and high heels.  And then there was that time when I could have caused a storm for one of Hans Blix’s U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq if I’d gone to my files and shopped around some images, with their overtones of bondage and Satanism.

The event above all others that I, as a photographer, looked forward to was the annual Black and Blue Ball, typically held at an impressive and spacious venue in Manhattan.  It was privately produced by two imaginative women who ran a dungeon downtown.  For big and small players across North America and Europe, the ball was the place and time to see and be seen.

It was a special night, open to the public (though “normal” people were generally too fearful to attend), with a license to serve alcohol (which meant the police could drop in at any time — and the one time I saw cops around, the three of them left far faster than they’d entered, after “admirers” had complimented them on the authenticity of their costumes and teasingly felt them up, deflating their machismo).  Hard-core players would come out to put themselves on record.  For others, it could be a test as to how they’d perform in a quasi-public setting (and, too, New York apartments tended to have thin walls).  As well, there were the voyeurs, for whom room was always made at high-priced events.

The ball went on into the very late hours, and that was a gold mine for me.  There were always side rooms and out-of-the-way corridors, where the heavier players could escape to and let go.  I was surprised how often they’d encourage me to photograph them, as though my presence heightened their scene, serving as a dare.  Rather than being a barrier, my camera helped me connect; with it I became complicit in the action taking place.

In those late hours, sexual distinctions blurred, inhibitions declined still further.  It was hard to tell the men’s toilets from the women’s.  I’d find myself at a urinal with a woman standing beside me using a bathroom mirror to brush her hair.  The presence of cross-dressers both confused and mediated things.

In many ways, the Black and Blue Ball was a barometer of the relative rise and decline of the New York fetish scene.  It had kicked off in 1994 and for most of a decade was an increasingly anticipated event that drew an outpouring of attendees.  But as the public face of the scene waned, so too did the size of the event’s venues until the ball itself was shifted from a mid-weekend Saturday night to a less-feasible Sunday (and then closing its doors forever in 2006).  Some event producers ascribed the decline to a fall-off in the impact of dominatrixes within the scene.  They’d injected an energy and direction and stabilizing asymmetry that wasn’t easy to replace.

Skin Two magazine itself underwent a restructuring, going from a quarterly to an annual publication.  I packed away my fetish negatives as I shifted to other projects.

Then, in early 2012, I was reminded of their possibilities while attending a gallery show in Brussels.  Returning to New York later that year, I slowly poured through the old negatives anew and had several dozen scanned.  In 2015 I expanded the book from its initial 54 images to its present form (excerpts of which are shown here).

I’d been increasingly working in black and white, which had a timeless quality I thought fitting for the fetish life I’d photographed, so I converted the color images I’d shot for Skin Two to black and white, eventually sequencing them into a series of sixty-two photographs: this project, New York Raw, a foray into the complex human animal we are.