Alex Henderson

The Adult Entertainment Industry 

"American  Ecstasy”: Barbara Nitke Photo Book Remembers 1980s Erotica in New York City



By Alex Henderson
RealmNoir, February 24, 2012

2012 marks two milestones for Barbara Nitke. 2012 is the 30th anniversary of her career as an erotic photographer, and it is also the year in which she is planning to publish her new photo book “American Ecstasy.” Looking back on the years Nitke spent documenting New York City’s contributions to vanilla adult films, “American Ecstasy” contains stills of Ron Jeremy, Vanessa del Rio, Nina Hartley, Sharon Kane, Siobhan Hunter, Jeanna Fine, Damien Cashmere, Jerry Butler (not to be confused with the R&B singer/Chicago politician), Sharon Mitchell, Tasha Voux and other well-known porn actors she photographed in the 1980s.

Getting“American Ecstasy”  “Am published has been a long and difficult battle for the NYC-based Nitke, whose book might have been published several years ago had editor/talk show host Judith Regan not been fired from publishing giant HarperCollins. Regan was not afraid of books that had a porn connection; she had published Jenna Jameson's “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star,” and she was quite serious about publishing  “American Ecstasy” as well. But when Regan was fired by the Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation-owned HarperCollins in 2006, Nitke knew she would have to search for another publisher.

“Judith Regan really believed in the book,” Nitke explains. “She was the only one in mainstream publishing who was willing to publish it. Judith has balls galore. I love her. She looked at my pictures and said, ‘Oh my God. This is really art. These are brilliant pictures.’ In my heart, I knew that she got it. I thought, ‘Wow, this is a completely mainstream person, and she really understands what I’m doing.’ HarperCollins had all the material, we had the contract, it was all in place—and then Judith got fired, and I really didn’t want HarperCollins to do it without her. With Judith Regan behind it, my book would have been great. But without Judith Regan at HarperCollins, it would have been a disaster.”

Nitke spoke to other mainstream publishing companies after the HarperCollins deal fell through, but even the ones that expressed interest in “American Ecstasy” wanted her to omit the more sexually explicit photos—which wasn’t something Regan wanted her to do and is something Nitke has refused to do.

“Either they wanted us to water it down, or they didn’t want to put out any book that had any type of association with porn,” Nitke notes. “This book is telling the story of a young photographer who was bowled over by all the sex that was going on around her—and if you took the sex out, it wouldn’t be authentic.”

Nitke, now 61, was in her early thirties when her association with the adult entertainment industry started in 1982. That year, she took stills for “The Devil in Miss Jones, Part 2,” a sequel to 1973’s “The Devil in Miss Jones” (one of the most famous porn films of the 1970s). Nitke went on to work as a still photographer on at least 300 more vanilla adult films in the Big Apple, and she has insisted that “American Ecstasy” be an accurate reflection of her work during that period of her career.

Nitke came to the conclusion that the only way to get “American Ecstasy” published without removing the more explicit photos was to publish it herself, and she has turned to Kickstarter.com in order to finance the book. Founded in 2008, Kickstarter is a company that allows Internet users to fund creative projects; the money that donors pledge is collected by Amazon Payments. Kickstarter takes 5% of the funds that are raised, while Amazon takes another 3-5%. Nitke, using Kickstarter, set out to raise $25,000 for “American Ecstasy” before a February 24 deadline; by February 24, she had raised more than $32,000.

Although Nitke has maintained an erotic orientation, she shifted her focus from vanilla hardcore porn to BDSM (bondage, domination, and sadomasochism) in the early 1990s—and her refusal to leave New York City was a major factor in that shift. Nitke didn’t grow up in the Big Apple; she was born in Lynchburg, Virginia (which, ironically, is also the late Rev. Jerry Falwell’s home town) and grew up in Virginia and Alaska before moving to NYC. But she loves her adopted home and had no desire to move to Los Angeles when she found American vanilla heterosexual porn becoming increasingly L.A.-centric in the early 1990s.

Los Angeles has been a hotbed of adult film activity since the 1970s; L.A. (especially the San Fernando Valley) has long been considered the adult film capital of the world, and many of the major adult companies that were formed in the 1970s or 1980s are based in Los Angeles (including Vivid Entertainment, Wicked Pictures, Red Light District, Evil Angel Video, Caballero Entertainment and Larry Flynt’s Hustler). But New York City definitely had its share of adult productions during the Golden Age of Porn (roughly the early 1970s through the mid-1980s), and Nitke knew it was time for a change of focus when she saw an abundance of adult talent moving west in the early 1990s.

“In the ‘80s, we New Yorkers prided ourselves on being equal to L.A. in hardcore vanilla porn,” Nitke asserts. “We liked to think we had an equal presence. But really, everybody moved out to California. The girls, for the most part, were being recruited in L.A.; you had your big casting in porn out there. If you were in New York and you were producing porn movies, you had to fly a lot of people in from L.A.—and it made sense for the producers in New York to move out there.”

“The whole vanilla hardcore porn business was moving out to L.A.,” Nitke continues, “and the truth is that I didn’t want to move there. I could have moved out to L.A. and continued to earn a living being a still photographer in that business, but I wanted to stay in New York—and then, the fetish porn thing broke open. My next clients turned out to be Bizarre Video, Gotham Gold, and various small companies around New York that were doing fetish porn.”

Long known for its abundance of BDSM clubs, dungeons, professional dominatrices and gay leathermen, New York City is the home of the Eulenspiegel Society (a BDSM social organization that goes back to 1971) and has one of the most celebrated BDSM communities in the United States. So when Nitke saw more and more vanilla porn talent moving west in the early 1990s and BDSM specialists like Bizarre Video and Gotham Gold started giving her work, she went with the flow; BDSM enabled her to stay in the Big Apple. Shooting stills for BDSM videos and taking photos of BDSM lifestyle couples, she found herself being described as a “fetish photographer.” Nitke’s BDSM-oriented photo book, “Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism,” was published in 2003.

Only one of the photos in “American Ecstasy” reflects Nitke’s interest in BDSM: a 1991 photo of a kinky submissive woman named Dusty. “I included that one transitional shot because so much of my work has been SM,” Nitke explains. “I wanted people to see my path from hardcore vanilla porn to SM.”

Much has changed in the adult entertainment industry since Nitke shot her first porn-related stills back in 1982. There was no Internet, adult movies were not being filmed digitally, and male porn stars didn’t have sexual enhancement drugs like Viagra and Cialis to fall back on if they were having sex with someone they weren’t necessarily attracted to. Looking back on all the times she watched adult movies being filmed in Manhattan in the 1980s, Nitke observes: “It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around this one, but they didn’t have Viagra back then. I can only imagine what it was like being a male porn star in those days before Viagra. I remember being on the set thinking, ‘Wow, this is difficult.’”

Nitke elaborates: “When I was in the porn business in the 1980s, guys would go into it thinking, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to pay me to have sex.’ But I could see that after the first year, it became more difficult for them. You had to get an erection, you had to do it on cue, you had to do it with somebody you may or may have been interested in, and you had to do it with a bunch of people watching and going, ‘How long is it going to take this guy? We want to go to lunch.’ I think the pressure of that was enormous. And they were shooting with real film. They would have to cut often to change the film magazine. They would be right in the middle of an orgy, and all of a sudden, they would be running out of film and have to cut. So everybody would have to stop so they could change the film, and then, they would have to go back to where they were before emotionally. Being on those sets, I had enormous respect for everything that the people did.”

One of the New York City residents who isn’t in “American Ecstasy” is the late Andrea True, who was a Golden Age of Porn favorite in the 1970s but retired from erotica not long before Nitke shot her first porn-related stills. True is also remembered for her disco singing (she enjoyed a major disco hit in 1976 with “More, More, More”), and when True’s name is mentioned, Nitke says, “I’m kind of sorry that I didn’t get into the porn business a bit earlier. I came into it at the tail end of the Golden Age of Porn. I got into the porn business as the transition to home video was starting to happen. The people who worked in porn in the ‘70s are so cool to me in a lot of ways. To them, it was more of a sexual freedom thing; at least that was my observation.”

Nonetheless, Nitke found that the 1980s were an exciting time to be in the adult entertainment industry, and she is hoping that “American Ecstasy” will become available to the public sooner rather than later. “It was very cool being a part of porn in the ‘80s,” Nitke recalls. “Everybody hung out. Everybody would tell everybody who would be shooting next. It was a fun time to be working in the porn business, and I make ‘American Ecstasy’ a diary of my own evolution. Being on the set with people who were having sex and getting to take pictures of it was so powerful to me.”

 

   Alex Henderson is a veteran journalist whose work has appeared in The L.A. Weekly, AlterNet, Billboard, Spin, XBIZ, Creem, The Pasadena Weekly and a long list of other well-known publications. He can be followed on Twitter @alexvhenderson.

Erotic photographer Barbara Nitke (above) raised more than $32,000 to publish her photo book "American Ecstasy," which looks back on the years she spent photographing adult film stars in New York City.  One of the many adult actresses she worked with in the 1980s was Melanie Scott, pictured below in Nitke's still from the 1984 film "She's So Fine."

 Adult actresses Sharon Kane and Carol Cross are seen in this Nitke photo from 1985.