Kiss of Fire
Book Introduction
Honoring the Sexual:
The Photographs of Barbara Nitke
by A. D. Coleman
Within the present generation of photographers, a
distinct cohort - more numerous by far than any preceding
it - has undertaken the exploration of what I've come
to call the photo-erotic: not just the making
of sexually provocative photographs, but the creation
of images that explicitly observe our sexual lives,
produced in collaboration with people willing to have
their own sexual behaviors described, interpreted,
and put on the public record by these photographers.
This represents a shift of no small
proportions in cultural attitudes toward the representation
of and discourse about human sexuality, a major leap
forward in frankness about matters sexual and full
disclosure of relevant particulars. At a time when
varieties of sexual practice once considered marginal
and taboo - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, s/m,
b&d, and more -- have moved from the periphery
to the center, and from the closet into the open,
the work of photographers such as Barbara Nitke has
helped bring the discussion of these sexual alternatives
into the mainstream.
These bodies of work collectively accomplish
their normalizing of sexual diversity and sexuality
itself in several ways:
-
by providing incontrovertible evidence
of what's actually going in our bedrooms (and in
the various other locales where we enact our erotic
lives);
-
by portraying for us a growing number
of individuals who have discarded any lingering
furtiveness related to their libidinous inclinations,
in favor of a full-frontal approach to lust;
-
and by rendering the sexual activity
of these fellow citizens of ours in vivid, respectful
images of such high quality that they clearly merit
presentation alongside the work of those contemporary
creative photographers who address other subjects
- work that, in effect, demands consideration as
art.
Which simply means that what the noted
commentator David Steinberg calls “sexual photography”
has come of age. If that's the case, how does a specific
instance, such as the work of Barbara Nitke, demonstrate
this maturation?
Like other of her contemporaries, Nitke
has undertaken this inquiry not briefly or casually,
but instead as a long-term project with no apparent
end in sight. As this first monograph indicates, it
began with commissions that took her inside the world
of X-rated film and video production. That, in turn,
evolved into her ongoing contemplation of present-day
sexual life as practiced by people who aren't professional
actors from the sex industry.
Certainly there's a relation between
those two environments, if only in that a heightened
sense of theater and ritual permeates much of the
experimental-sex scene: costume, setting, props, lighting,
even dialogue often result from careful planning,
rehearsal, and practiced interaction. Some (though
by no means all) of this does resolve as public behavior,
in the sense that many of the people portrayed here
regularly act out these rituals in front of others
at private gatherings large and small. Whether performed
in total privacy or before a select audience, this
has obvious analogues in theater; no accident that
such concepts as role-playing, staging, and “scenes”
lie at the heart of much sex play.
But there are notable differences between
such presentations, no matter how elaborate, and the
market-driven output of the commercial triple-X industry.
Most significantly, Nitke shows us people doing things
they already do in private, by themselves and/or among
friends, for their own pleasure and not for pay -
things they would be doing even if she weren't on
the spot with her camera and film. So these activities
aren't feigned or pretended here. Nor are they orchestrated
- at least not by Nitke. As a result, they don't represent
her scripts, her scenarios, her fantasies; instead,
they limn the sexual imaginations of her subjects,
toward whose manifestations Nitke functions as a documentarian
and translator.
Yet it would be simplistic to propose
her position here as neutral, detached, and non-participatory.
The mere presence of any person -- especially one
with a camera - in any social situation inevitably
affects the behavior of others in that situation.
Certainly the inclusion of a clearly empathetic and
fascinated onlooker necessarily shifts the psychodynamics.
“People do these scenes alone with me,”
Nitke has explained. “I don't participate when
I take pictures, but it becomes a three-way emotionally.
People let me in.” So the involvement of a photographer
in these private events makes them more intricate,
inevitably, thus adding to the complexity of interpreting
the results.
At the same time, the illusion of transparency
that photography makes possible - the sense that one
is looking through a lens at the scene itself, in
real (if suspended) time, with no interference from
any intermediary - remains one of the medium's dependable
strengths. In some photographs of people, one can
discern immediately the photographer's impact on the
dynamics of the event. In others, the photographer
has somehow managed to “disappear.” Nitke
doesn't intrude herself into her images in any insistent
way; the integration is seamless. This is no small
accomplishment under these circumstances.
In making the earlier images of the
X-rated film sets, Nitke of course took her place
among the clutter of people who inhabit those contexts:
gaffers, cameramen, stylists, makeup artists, “fluffers.”
Becoming faceless in such a crowd isn't difficult,
because everyone - including the actors - works hard
at pretending they aren't there. Indeed, one of the
recurrent themes of those particular images is the
interface between on-stage and back-stage, a Brechtian
look at the mechanisms of erotic film-making. Though
they offer fascinating glimpses of this component
of the sex industry, these pictures bear less of a
personal stamp than those to which Nitke would subsequently
turn her attention.
The real challenge for a photographer
lies in evaporating from an intimate situation in
which, by definition, one is an outsider, even if
one is there by invitation. Nitke achieves this to
such an extent that the viewer can't discern any consequence
of her presence in these more recent images. None
of these people play to the camera, or even indicate
any awareness of its existence; none display any level
of the self-consciousness that could easily result
from the inclusion of a relative stranger in situations
of deep intimacy that have as their common goal the
discarding of inhibition. Nitke's images convince
the viewer that she has not (to use a terms from physics)
"perturbed" or otherwise interfered with
what presented itself to her through the lens - that
one is simply, suddenly, there as it unfolds.
In addition to achieving this illusion
of invisibility, Nitke places a stylistic imprint
- the mark of her own distinct sensibility - on these
images in several identifiable ways. First, she consistently
establishes a distance between her subjects and her
lens that positions the viewer perceptually and psychologically
not at voyeur's-eye distance but at a participant's
proximity. Imagining oneself as the observer of these
particular tiny slices of time and space, as photographs
persuade one to do, almost always puts one in the
thick of the action, close enough to touch the protagonists
- making the viewer one of them, even if by proxy,
not someone peeping from yards away. This carries
with it a distinct erotic charge, as if one's surrogate
persona suddenly found itself transported into a situation
of emotional and erotic intensity in which it was
deeply implicated.
The other quality I find here I can
only describe as tenderness, and its evidence throughout
Nitke's work has a two-fold aspect. Her attentiveness
to the playful, deeply loving undercurrent of the
human relationships she meditates on in her pictures
is one of those manifestations. “What got me
into it was the tremendous amount of love between
the players,” she has said. So her images address
the tension between that affectional, humorful aspect
of these lovers' games and what she describes as “the
intense energy of ritual, passionate s/m.” This
blending of an alertness to emotional vulnerability
and bonding with what she terms the "visceral"
aspect of s/m constitutes one of the hallmarks of
Nitke's vision.
The other is her own response to those
relationships and these sexual components thereof,
which is not a conventionally moralistic reaction
but which it would be inaccurate to describe merely
as nonjudgmental. Nitke does in fact weigh these people
and their behaviors in her imagery, and she finds
them good. “I wanted to photograph deep intimacy
and trust, the two main concepts which underlie all
s/m practices,” she writes in an artist's statement.
Elsewhere she has asserted, “What I see is people
who really love each other who just have a different
way of expressing it. . . . I think it should be honored.
I think all sexual outlets should be honored.”
Though tacit in its expression here, this favorable,
supportive assessment of her subjects and the ways
they've chosen to live their sexual lives is palpable
in her images and her evocative captions thereto.
“These people are my friends,”
Nitke told one interviewer. “To me they are ordinary
people, and I mean that in the best sense.” In
that spirit, she is currently suing U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft, a benighted Comstockian embarrassed
and offended by the bare breast of a statue of Justice,
in order to combat the notorious Communications Decency
Act -- yet another desperate and doomed fundamentalist
effort to censor the Internet. That lawsuit stands
as an act of citizenship, undertaken on behalf of
all who agree with Nitke about the imperative of keeping
the government out of whatever takes place between
consenting adults.
It may overshadow - at least for a time
- what Barbara Nitke has achieved in her remarkable
photographs. But these two courses of action, the
legal and the imagistic, do not represent separate
concerns. To the contrary, they have exactly the same
purpose: honoring the sexual in ourselves. However
that case resolves, these photographs - and the motives
behind them on the parts of all involved in their
making - will endure.
Footnotes:
••o••••••••••••••••••••"Slap
Happy: Two Photographers Document the S/M Life,"
Village Voice, November 24, 1998, p. 43.
2 Quoted in •••••••••••
••••
3 Quoted in •••m••••••v•••••••••••••••••••••••••••Salon.com/Premium.
4 Quoted in •••m••••op.
cit.
5.Filed preemptively on December 11, 2001, t•is
case,•Nitke v. Ashcroft, is a test case sponsored
by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom www.ncsfreedom.org).
As of this writing, it is working its way through
the legal system.
© Copyright 2003 by A. D. Coleman.
All rights reserved. By permission of the author and
Image/World Syndication Services, P.O.B. 040078, Staten
Island, New York 10304-0002 USA; T/F (718) 447-3091,
imageworld@nearbycafe.com.
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