Barbara Nitke born is an American art photographer who specializes in the subject of human sexual relations. She has worked extensively in the porn and BDSM communities. Nitke was born in Lynchburg , Virginia in and grew up in Virginia and Alaska. Hailed by The Village Voice for her quest "to find humanity in marginal sex", [ 2 ] Nitke has gained worldwide attention for her photographs chronicling relationships between consenting adults engaged in sadomasochistic activities.
Her documentation of sexuality began in on the sets of pornographic films , towards the end of the Golden Age of Porn. Her photographs from this period reveal the combination of boredom, surrealism, vulnerability and dissociation inherent in the X-rated world. In , after the hardcore porn business moved to Los Angeles, she began shooting on the New York sets of fetish and SM movies, which had become the fastest growing segment of the adult film industry.
Three years later she attended her first meeting of The Eulenspiegel Society , the oldest SM support and educational group in the country, to see a presentation by underground photographer Charles Gatewood. The couples she met in the SM scene fascinated her, and she began photographing them in It was among the first mainstream publications to examine the subject of BDSM.
Nitke ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to produce her second book, Barbara Nitke: American Ecstasy , a memoir in pictures and words of her hardcore porn days. In , Nitke filed a lawsuit, along with co-plaintiff the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom , challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act , a federal statute prohibiting the publication of obscenity on the Internet.
The case was called Nitke v. Ashcroft , then later changed to Nitke v. California defines obscenity according to community standards, the Internet does not permit publishers to restrict the dissemination of their speech based on geography. Therefore, the plaintiffs claimed, a person posting sexually explicit material on the Internet could be found criminally liable according to the standards of the most restrictive community in the country. This, Nitke said, would chill her freedom of speech and therefore violate her First Amendment rights.
