Photographer Barbara Nitke Kickstarts Golden Age of Porn Book

NEW YORK, NY — If a picture is worth 1000 words, how much is a photo book chronicling the behind-the-scenes world of Golden Age pornography? New York fine art and commercial photographer, Barbara Nitke proposes $25,000.  Nitke is best known for her compassionate perspective on alternative sex. During the 1980s, Nitke was a still photographer who worked on at least 300 porn shoots in New York City. As one would imagine, that provided her with a unique perspective on a barely legal form of filmmaking. According to Nitke, “There was a pretty large porn industry here at that time, and the porn stars traveled back and forth from LA to New York for work. Our crews were made up of people straight out of NYU Film School.  The porn industry was the first place they found work.  It was also the first place I found work as a photographer and I have always been grateful to the industry because I learned my craft on those sets.”  While snapping photos, Nitke kept some for herself. Now she’d like to share them with the world, which is why she is using KickStarter.com to help raise $25,000 to self-publish American Ecstasy. So far, $9,000 have been raised via the crowdsourcing site.  As Nitke explains it, the book is a memoir in pictures and words of the 12 years she spent working on porn sets where actual film was used and performers did not look like they had just walked off of the pages of a fashion magazine.  “It’s hard to imagine now,” Nitke says, “but back in the 1980’s people lined up outside of real movie theaters to watch feature length sex flicks.”  The first film Nitke worked on was Devil in Miss Jones II, in 1982. A big budget production with a 10 day shooting schedule and crew of approximately 25 people.  “We had a script, the actors memorized lines, the crew obsessed over getting the lighting right — it was just like working on a mainstream independent feature,“ she observes. “I was excited as hell to be there!" American Ecstasy is a nostalgic view of those heady days and is packed with photographs that, while undeniably sexual, reach beyond the usual sex machine image of the industry to reveal the touching humanness of the actors. Often shot between takes, when the actor’s porn star masks were down, the images are deeply intimate.  Disheveled, semi-naked starlets huddle together in between takes, staring out into the distance with combat soldier stares. A paunchy director, wearing a baseball cap, comes into the frame to give Nina Hartley a few notes on her performance. The actor underneath her keeps right on going.  The book also includes stories Nitke wrote of the day-to-day life on the sets and includes clips from extensive interviews she conducted with the porn stars of the day.  "I realized pretty quickly that I was in a privileged position as a set photographer," she explains. “I worked for the producers and shot the images they needed to publicize the movies, but I was also able to shoot shots that I considered much more artistic for myself. I always knew I wanted to make a book out of my experience. I wanted to show my personal collection of behind the scenes images and also wanted to tell my personal stories of day-to-day life on the sets."  Unfortuantely, Nitke found it impossible to locate a mainstream publisher willing to touch her work. "The only one that had enough courage to publish it," she says, "was Judith Regan, who was with HarperCollins. She published the Jenna Jameson book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. She bought the project and then got fired, just as the book was about to go into production. I had another small book deal after that, which also fell through, so I decided to take charge and publish it myself."  In an essay for the book, art critic Arthur C. Danto, who compares her work to Robert Mapplethorpe, writes, “From reading these 'verbal shots’ of life in the porn world, one realizes that the scenario is as rigid as those of commedia dell’arte. Instead of Columbine and Pierrot, one has the needful housewife and the pizza boy, delivering initially the pie and then himself…”     "I think the time is right," Nitke says. "The pictures and stories are a part of Amercan history and deserve to be out in the world."  As thanks for those who contribute toward her $25,000 goal, Nitke offers rewards ranging from classic postcards to prints of the photos and, of course, copies of the book itself. Those who wish to contribute to this project can do so at Kickstarter.com.