



1 / 15 Chevron Chevron Photograph by Susan Meiselas / Magnum Asphyxiation by Mistress Beatrice, the Medical Room.

The documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield once wanted to make a movie about Carnival Strippers, the small-town striptease performances I’d photographed in the early nineteen-seventies, but when I met him, in the eighties, there was really nothing left to film. The girl shows had effectively been closed down by protests and by the economics of the expanding sex industry. But in the mid-nineties Nick was commissioned by HBO to make a film on S & M. When he found Pandora’s Box, an S & M club on Eighteenth Street, in New York, he said it was like Carnival Strippers for a new decade, and he invited me to come to see it. I rode my bike to Eighteenth Street, went up the elevator, and entered. It was like a film set or the backstage of a theatre. I was stunned by the level at which the interiors had been constructed, how the walls were painted, and how each room had its own identity—the Versailles Room, the Medical Room, the Dungeon.

I was fascinated by the sense of performance, and by the ways in which the mistresses chose their clients and the clients their mistresses. The dominatrix might select the “punishment,” but, ultimately, the client defined the degree to which he wanted to be whipped or what sort of equipment he wanted used. As a photographer who had documented social conflicts, I had seen violence and the corresponding trauma it inflicted. I had heard about what happened in interrogation cells, and I had seen those spaces firsthand. At Pandora’s Box, I was witnessing an individual choose to participate in what looked from the outside like a violent act. But it represented play in a controlled setting where the man could say, “Mercy, mistress,” and it stopped. As with Carnival Strippers, it was the power relations that really captured my attention—women who wield a kind of power that is suspect to others.

Mistress Catherine after the Whipping, the Versailles Room. Photograph by Susan Meiselas / Magnum

Still, I found S & M culture challenging. When Pandora’s Box moved to a new space, right around the time Nick was finishing filming, the club now seemed to me almost tawdry in its theatricality. I knew I could have gone back and pursued Mistress Raven, the owner, or some of the other mistresses, and tried to portray the duality of their real lives as opposed to their fantasies. I knew about the larger life they were part of and the invisible subculture, or “slave culture,” that surrounded them. But I made a choice not to get lost in that world. It felt like a place I was not sure I wanted to go. Instead, I simply stopped shooting and put the work aside.

There is a subtle process here that all documentarians know: you allow yourself to become immersed and then you have to pull out. Knowing when to get out takes judgment, and I think it is intuitive. But sometimes, as with my photos of Pandora’s Box, you feel some sense of incompleteness. At the heart of a project like this is an implicit collaboration: we are all here, looking at each other. The documentary photographer can cross the line and show that the conflict zone is not just a battleground in a distant land; it is also in our homes, it is self-inflicted, it is in our heads.

This piece was drawn from “Susan Meiselas: On the Frontline,” which was released this month by Aperture.