Bettie Page: Restrain bondage Princess

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Irving Klaw began selling pin-up pictures in the 1950s, many of which featured the well-known Bettie Page. When he began to receive demands from his clients for images of damsels in what would today be considered S & M and restrain bondage situations, he complied. Making 16mm films out of his own home featuring Bettie and other glamour damsels of the era, Klaw created an oeuvre which today's fetish material resumes to reference. Much of this work was burned when Klaw was accused of purveying pornography, and the films collected here are rarities not precedingly available. Surreal and strangely innocent, the films and pictures are apparently staged in someone's basement, while the fetishwear--not widely attainable in those days--was mostly homemade, lending the work an immediacy and sensitized closeness not to be found in similar, more contemporary, films.