Asia Bondage
- photographs by Steven Speliotis

$32.95
ISBN 398076026X
available through Amazon

Reviewed by Julian Robinson
(12/25/02)

Rope is an active partner in Speliotis' stunning fine art photographs of passionate bondage. Winding, wrapping, confining, constricting, it does far more than limit movement and restrict posture. It adorns the female form; it complements her curves while invading her most private, most sensitive regions. It frees her from society's strictures of modesty, allowing her to offer herself as a creature of desire, liberated from propriety, released from restraint.

Photographer, art director, bondage master, and lighting designer Speliotis explains: "My belief that we are all in some type of bondage -- restricted, held back, unable to express ourselves -- combined with my interest in Asian cultures is how I came to choose the Asian Woman as my model to portray this complex psychological state." During the shooting sessions, he rapidly discovered the paradox of dominance and submission: "Ironically, I often found myself being topped by the bottom. This role-reversal had me wondering if I had voluntarily given my power away, or was just being a nice guy, respectful and honoring my model's limits."

His background in dance photography, sculpture, and yoga gives these black and white works an aesthetic elegance, formal discipline, and classical composition that harkens back to the unbroken tradition of photographing the female nude. In its geometric rigor and command of shape and space, Asia Bondage stands alongside the nudes of Ruth Bernhard and Edward Weston in the artistic canon.

Beyond offering 150 beautifully reproduced, full-page images, Asia Bondage's creative imagination and erotic intensity most make it worth owning. Not all the models are tightly bound. Sometimes the gorgeously highlighted white nylon rope is only present as a few loose, draping strands, sometimes as parallel lines or gridwork dividing the frame. Sometimes there's no rope at all.

One close-up depicts a nipple distended by a tiny black noose; another combines a blurred background expression of anguished exhaustion with a single rope dividing a foregrounded breast prominent as a mountain peak. A torso shot includes two ropes stretched taut as they pass between the closed legs of the model, pulling upward on her crotch. In contrast, the ropes' slithering shadows, soft and sensuous, caress her belly's contours. There's hair and foot and neck bondage, rope gags and head nets, pre-bondage shots, bondage-in-progress shots, silhouettes, portraits, ingenious uses of chairs and stools, and the sexiest tongue you've ever seen.

The models' faces reveal their deep involvement: pain and wonder, arousal and revelation, pride and shame. Says Speliotis: "At times, the energy generated between myself and my model would bring us into a 'zone.' Something other than our known selves would take over the creative process." The moving results of this collaborative spirit document the mutuality found in the best BDSM scenes.

Such a dynamic gives Asia Bondage its compelling power: tradition and taboo, aesthetic discipline married to physical provocation, rope's stringent embrace giving birth to a submissive strength that comes into being only when it has something to struggle against.