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 A beautiful naked woman straddles a man's face. At the same time, she is talking nonchalantly with the average-Joe in a truckers hat who stands next to her. The boredom on her face is palpable, verging on complete and total apathy. This is the porn scene never seen, the moment when a director interrupts the shoot to speak with his actors. The juxtaposition of actions produces a shocking and uncomfortable image. It is these true, gritty moments that drive Barbara Nitke.  Ms. Nitke got her start in 1982 as a photographer on porn sets in Manhattan, shooting box covers and stills of sex scenes. She found the "down time" between takes far more intriguing than the actual action and struck a deal with the directors: she could shoot those in-between times in addition to the "good stuff." What she discovered was the prosaic, the mundane and the real-life person behind each porn star facade. The photographic results are both stunning and disturbing, a weird world laid even barer.As the porn business in NYC closed shop and headed for California, the only shoots left to be shot were fetish videos, and Nitke segued easily into the realm of Bizarre, the Brooklyn production company that created such kinky classics as The Dresden Diaries, Leatherbound Dykes from Hell and TV Dildo Fantasy. This was Barbara's introduction to the BDSM world.  Much as she had with the porn subjects, Nitke noticed the passion beneath the role-playing and became more interested in the behind the scenes moments on the sets, "the little arguments in the makeup room over who had to be the top that day and how to make it look like somebody was in pain when they weren't. There was a zany spirit to the fetish porn business that intrigued me," and that spirit is visible in her work from the time. These people were enjoying themselves immensely and Nitke wanted to learn more.Eventually she ventured into a meeting of The Eulenspiegel Society (the country's oldest and largest SM support group) and immediately felt she'd found a home. Soon the joke was that Barbara's "toy bag" was a small brown paper one filled with film, rather than the usual BDSM player's bag stuffed with whips and floggers. Becoming a welcome denizen in places like The Hellfire, Nitke chronicled the underground antics and raw emotions of the city's serious players, deftly capturing sly smiles, tortured tears and the fleeting moments of tender BDSM interaction. "These people were very nurturing, and that interested me," Nitke explained at a recent slide show presentation at Toys in Babeland.  She wanted to explore the nurturing aspect more closely, so in 1994, Nitke began shooting couples - gay and straight, committed by marriage or servitude -- engaged in numerous forms of intimate SM sexual expression.Like the proverbial "fly on the wall," Nitke was given unparalleled access to the private lives of her subjects. Finding herself in bedrooms snapping lovers having sex, she says, "I feel they have given me an incredible gift by allowing me into their intimate lives." Her recent release Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism (published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, Germany) features over 60 duotone photographs of these couples captured in the throes of passion, in moments of deep top and bottom space during SM play, or in Nitke's favorite, those "golden moments" at the end of a scene when a person's true identity shines through. In the introduction to Kiss of Fire, Nitke also talks about the endorphin rush felt by SM players as an out-of-body experience akin to flying. That rush is palpable in many of her photographs.  In 2001, Barbara Nitke signed on as a co-plaintiff with The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom in a lawsuit against John Ashcroft and The Communications Decency Act. Nitke worried that her web site might get her into trouble and, after consulting with lawyers, she was told that her work could, indeed, be deemed illegal under the Communications Decency Act. It is still a felony to put obscene material on the Internet and obscenity remains defined according to what are obviously varied local community standards.Nitke felt legally limited by what may be considered obscene in perhaps a more rural or religious part of the country as opposed to the rather loose standards of New York City. The panel of judges, Circuit Judge Robert D. Sack, District Judges Richard M. Berman and Gerard E. Lynch, agreed that the CDA's overbroad interpretation of "local community standards" might ban protected speech, especially that "whose value is not understood as 'serious' by an audience unfamiliar with alternative lifestyles."  Nitke's intimate knowledge of these alternative lifestyles, coupled with her wholesome, midwestern demeanor, makes her the perfect emissary to the less familiar straight world. To view her photographs is to be given an instructional window into how rational, consenting adults incorporate BDSM into their personal lives.Nitke's work has been shown in solo shows in New York, New Orleans, Provincetown, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Europe. She has pieces in the permanent collection of the Finnish Museum of Photography and the Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago. She is currently president of The Camera Club of New York (founded in 1884 by Alfred Stieglitz) and is faculty member at New York's School of Visual Arts. Visit her web site, www.barbaranitke.com, to learn - and see - more. And for more information on the CDA lawsuit, visit www.ncsfreedom.org.
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