Bondage Radio

Love is a many-splendored thing, and lovers symbolize it with roses, candy and – in the case of those appearing in the work of New York art photographer Barbara Nitke – welts.

And bruises. And bloodletting. And skin pinching. And spanking. And bondage. For a decade, Nitke, some of whose photographs are on display at San Francisco’s Mark I. Chester Studio, has documented New York’s sadomasochism and bondage-and-discipline scene. Her 104-page book, “Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of SM,” contains 61 photos and was released in October. It documents couples for whom love often wears leather and transcends traditional expectations.

“There’s something beautiful about anyone who’s in love,” Nitke, a Lynchburg, Va., native, said last week by phone from her midtown-Manhattan apartment. “It crosses all the boundaries. It doesn’t matter if they’re gay or straight or SM or uptight or not uptight. People in love are beautiful. In the end that’s what I wanted to show.”

Nitke has been in San Francisco since Saturday to participate in events tied to Leather Week, the annual celebration by San Francisco’s SM community culminating with Sunday’s Folsom Street Fair. It is likely that there, too, love, like bullwhips, will crackle in the air.

“What I’m seeing after 10 years of being around SM is that sometimes people really want to transcend this earth plane, and one of the ways they do that is through SM,” Nitke said. “So they go into a very spiritual state, really, where they completely abandon themselves into this state. Maybe that’s love on another plane, or (at) a higher octane.”

In her early 20s, Nitke, who is 53, married Herb Nitke, who produced off- Broadway plays, horror movies and adult films (including the 1972 movie “The Devil in Miss Jones”). At length, Nitke became a photographer on adult film sets, eventually shooting publicity stills for 300 such movies. (She earns a living now doing similar work for television shows.)

Ten years after her marriage dissolved, Nitke joined the porn star Rick Savage, a friend, on a mid-1990s excursion to the Eulenspiegel Society, which was founded informally in 1971 as a gathering of New York SM enthusiasts.

“I walked in the door and literally fell in love with everybody,” she said. Although she had loved the adult-film world, she had found it occasionally cynical and fake. By contrast, the Eulenspiegel folks seemed open, honest – and loving. “Everybody was down to earth,” Nitke said. “They were genuinely in love with each other.”

She added, “I often think that you think you’re going into some dark shadow thing, but I feel like I kind of came into the light when I met all these people. I think it got me more in touch with love. It brought me to a less cynical place in my own life, saying that people do fall in love, that it exists out there.”

For six months, Nitke attended the group’s twice-weekly meetings, which included how-to presentations and a time for sharing thoughts, concerns and experiences. During that first half-year, she left her camera at home in order to gain members’ trust. “Then I told them I was a photographer coming from the porn world,” she said. After that, members began letting her photograph them, even though she doesn’t participate in SM. “I’m sort of like a voyeur,” she said.

Advocates say that SM gets a bad rap from those who misunderstand it. “A lot of people hear the word sadomasochism and go running for cover,” Nitke said with a laugh, adding that her initial preconceptions were upended through exposure to the people in the group. “I went into my first Eulenspiegel meeting thinking there had to be some psychological damage, or that the brain pathways were warped, and I don’t think that’s true,” she said.

Another misconception, Nitke says, is that those participating in SM are inflicting pain for purely sadistic reasons, or receiving it for masochistic ones. “When they say ‘pain,’ they’re not talking about hitting your thumb with a hammer,” she said. “They’re talking about a sensation that brings them into an ecstatic state.”

She added, “When you’re talking about SM, the person who is taking the top (or active) position is doing what the bottom wants. They’re taking them on a journey and bringing them pleasure.”

Early on, Nitke saw that Eulenspiegel members, by dint of their proclivities, had become expert communicators. Those negotiating a “scene” – a proscribed time of SM play – decide on everything from who will do what (and how much) to whom to what “safe word” will denote overstepped boundaries. “People are very minute in their taste,” Nitke said. She added, “The communication thing was extraordinary to see.”

Still, misconceptions about SM extended to publishers. It’s taken Nitke 18 years to find one for “Kiss of Fire” – the German publisher Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg – in part because the work is explicit and in part because it’s not easily marketable. “What people like to publish is hot babes in fetish gear,” Nitke said. “That’s not what I do. The ‘Kiss of Fire’ body of work is real people, people who love each other who happen to do SM as a way of expressing their love for each other.”

She added, “I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that love is love, no matter how you express it. Love is love.”
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Where to go

Barbara Nitke’s photographs are on display at the Mark I. Chester Studio, 1229 Folsom St. (between Eighth and Ninth streets). (415) 621-6294. For more information, including how to purchase her book, “Kiss of Fire,” visit www.barbaranitke.com.

The Folsom Street Fair takes place from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday on Folsom Street between Seventh and 12th streets.