The video is 1:48 seconds long. Pause to view any image individually.
I’ve decided to take this opportunity to restudy earlier work and create a video of some
selected projects. Something different each week for 6-8 weeks. This week’s video will
feature images from my book KINK, a project for which I made photographs
only one day each year over the course of 25 years.
WARNING: I ask that you please read the following BEFORE viewing
the images in this video. The images may feel offensive for some.
On a sunny Sunday afternoon, about 30 years ago, my wife, Beverly Ornstein, and I dropped
off film from a previous day’s shoot at a lab on Folsom Street in the commercial area
south of Market Street in San Francisco. There, we encountered an astonishing scene
that included thousands of people, many in elaborate costumes and makeup, and some
totally or nearly naked, taking part in a theatrical world of countless fantasies.
The Folsom Street Fair is held every year in San Francisco on the last Sunday in September,
celebrating the world of kink and bondage, discipline and sadomasochism (BDSM).
The encounter that day in 1991 became the trigger for a serious photographic exploration
now spanning a quarter century. The next year I rented an exhibitor’s space at the fair,
assembled an outdoor studio and spent the entire day making portraits of attendees.
These portraits depict the vast creativity that is the human, intriguing, amazing and
sometimes shocking world to which I was privy during this exploration. About 250
“sittings” in one Sunday of each year, for 7,500 on all, an exceedingly rich body of work.
Please share this work.
Many thanks,
Howard Schatz
