Dominas

Dominas is much more than a photographic book, it’s a map that brings the viewer under the skin, where there’s no sunlight, and the inner parts of every selves lie. Consisting in three homogeneous fragments, this body of work displays large scale portraits of 24 women working professionally in the BDSM industry, bound to a selection of excerpts of interviews between these women and the author, Max Eicke.

By opening the doors of their private places, where they can strip themselves from masks and wigs, these women reveal all the nuances of conviction and inner conflict. They put an emphasis on the present, the only time that matters for them, and think little of their long-term futures. The camera seems to offer some kind of salvation, a kind of self redemption. The words they choose to tell their stories are full of experience but also emotions, sufferings, fears; a true personal narrative where they link the reason for choosing this profession to how they view theirselves within the sex industry.

The author wants to show us a universe of a dual nature, a subject and a corner of the world like reinforced concrete, where the languages that live and recount are lightweight paper of skin. Violence and fragility are enclosed in every detail: captured with the camera, where round and rigid lines chase each other, muscles and softness, extreme and composed; captured in their honest and desperate streams of consciousness, a fluid unveiling, interrupted by the crudeness these women carry every day on their shoulders.

“We’ll get rid of first names, get rid of upbringing and influences, get rid of language and everything else that somehow made you who you are. This is a paint that you don’t reach in an everyday life, the paint where you finally find your own self, with moaning, with shaking, with shouting, with whatever. It’s mind-blowing.”

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