Hans van der Kamp

The first time I was asked by a magazine editor to photograph a couple engaged in BDSM, I simply refused. A few other photographers also refused. Somehow that made it into a challenge, because I was the youngest photographer aboard. When I was asked for a second time; I accepted the assignment.

I felt awkward when they opened the door, although the house they lived in seemed quite normal to me. They offered me a coffee and started talking about their love life, smiling a lot and holding hands. I still felt uncomfortable. The ear of the coffee cup felt kind of sticky and so did the fake leather couch I was sitting on. Maybe I was starting to imagine things?

Before I had left to do the assignment, a psychologist working for the same magazine had explained to me that a healthy BDSM relationship was all about men being submissive to the female, dominant partner. When the man in the house told me that he was the dominant and that his wife was his submissive, I asked permission to use the phone to call my editor. I was sent to the wrong address. No doubt about that. A woman beating up a man for sexual pleasure was completely in sync with contemporary conventions. But a man inflicting pain on his wife… That was unthinkable!

The couple seemed pretty amused and they explained that their role play had nothing to do with aggression and I reluctantly followed them to the basement that looked like a set for a Dracula movie. There were hundreds of strange gadgets hanging from the walls and there were ropes and chains everywhere. I wanted to go home, but as the woman sat down on the chair and the man started to tie her to it with a rope, I became intrigued by their ritual. Something had changed between them. There was a tension in the air but not one of stress or fear. Somehow the atmosphere seemed almost religious to me.

As always I was hiding behind my camera, pretending there was no reality outside the limited space of my viewfinder, while I slowly and carefully moved around the couple to take pictures. As I was standing behind the woman, her man unexpectedly squeezed her nipples very hard and her head fell back with a sigh. She was staring right into the center of my viewfinder and the look in her eyes made me shiver. Somehow I recognized that look, but I could not place it. Up to this day I still cannot find the words to describe what I saw. A mixture of serenity and arousal maybe, but these words seem so flat and they do not fully reflect the intensity.

Something snapped inside of me; I mumbled some excuses and left the house in a hurry, leaving two lens caps, a costly exposure meter and several rolls of film. The moment I returned to my studio I starting developing the film and began making enlargements of that last picture, fearing that what I had seen only existed in my mind, but it was right there on photographic paper and the longer I looked at the picture the harder it became to determine what was going on in her mind, but the look in her eyes kept fascinating me for years.

When the editor asked about the pictures; I made up some story about bad lighting. He bought it and I kept the photographs to myself. It took almost two decades before I started photographing BDSM again — with only one goal in mind and that was to see what I had seen in the eyes of that particular woman. [To be continued...]

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