Setting the Standard for Domme Photos and Dealing with Santillo

You think dommes have less than deserved egos? Then you don’t hang out with photographers.  If a fashion/adult photographer is good enough to support himself then in his mind he’s the new Robert Mapplethorpe.  Sure I’ve told people they were “blessed by my presence,” but that’s the game isn’t it.  Have you ever met a person who honestly felt he or she was bettering your life by just being in it? Had to spend a lot of time with said person?  Had to work with him or her?  Huuuh-boy.

The top of this list was Will Santillo, with whom I worked with a lot.  Well, it was a lot of work and expensive but I would get what I wanted.

Me-owch.

This is from my first photo-shoot with Will in April of 2003.  This picture is freakin’ EVERYWHERE.  Keep in mind these were the days when most photos of dommes were still taken with a point and shoot 35 film camera by their slave or boyfriend or dungeon owner and scanned on a scanner from Office Deopt.  Nobody was hiring a make-up artist or a photographer at the time, let alone spending a whole afternoon and $900.

I’m still surprised at the prevalence of this photo.  Go ahead, take it (everyone has) and do a Google image search of it.  It’s everywhere.  I rarely get credit for it even though I commissioned it for my own promotion.  Every so often I get an email by some eagle eyed kinkster saying he found it in some ad or promotion and asks if I am associated with them or are now doing sessions in Butt-Fuck, Kansas now.  I’ll go to the source and politely ask them to take it down because it’s my freakin’ image and will get the inevitable response, “Oh, I thought it was just a generic picture of a dominatrix.” (Generic??!!?! Bah.)

I always art direct my own photo shoots.  Sure, while there is a lot of give an take with the photographer, but I always have something in mind.  One of my all time favorite photos is this one as it came out exactly as I imagined it.

Boobs . . .  legs . . . wait a minute!

Man, I love the elegance and subtle story it tells.  This was taken in May 2005 when most “action shots” were of a domme staring blankly into the camera next to her 300 lb, 65 year-old slave’s tied up penis.  Yes, darlin’, we can see that you can actually do a CBT tie.  Good on ya’.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to get Santillo to get this shot.  I wanted the focus to be on me in my signature pin stripped suit and the male model in a business suit not really visible except for my shoe in his groin and his tensed hands.  The whole point of this photo was to get someone to look at it long enough to make a story in his head.  Sure most pictures will get a guy excited and he’ll go jerk-off, but if he had a story that photo would stay with him and then he might actually call me and book a session.

Santillo didn’t get it.  But I was paying $2,000 for this particular photo shoot, and like fuck was I going to let him shoot for his ego.  This was for my image and promotion.

A lot of good photos came out of this shoot and the one before it, though. Like this one:

Boobs. . .legs. . .boobs again.

Which you might recognize here:

Boobs! My boobs are famous!

Sure it’s great to be on the cover of Skin Two as well as in the featured spread, but I didn’t get any credit for it. Nope. None.

Somewhere along the line, around 2006, came the big M and Santillo feud.  Santillo wanted me to sign over the rights to the photos so he could do a series of coffee table books.  I wouldn’t get credit or any of the proceeds.  So why would I do that? Because I would be a part of his dream.  Lucky. Me.  Here's a bit of that story:

It’s a common practice for models/dommes and photographers to do something called TFP, which is time for prints, pretty much a straight trade for both parties and usually a signed agreement that the photos will not be sold to a third party, but for promotion towards future work.  This wasn’t anything close to that.  I had paid this man over $15,000 over the course of a few years.  I figured the cost I endured for the photos he wanted came to about $8,000 and said if he reimbursed me he could use the photos.

“But that would come out of my own pocket!” He replied to me via email.

Where did he think the money originally came from? It was my pocket. I wasn’t asking to be paid for being the model/wardrobe supplier/art-director, I simply felt that if he was going to make money from them then I shouldn’t have had to fund them in the first place.

This may seem outrageous for him to claim, but it was congruent with his growing ego as a photographer.  He saw himself as the biggest fetish photographer on the scene and he had raised his rates from $900 for a three set up shoot to $3000 for a 4 set up shoot in only 3 years.  His reasoning for that was because that was what Ken Marcus charged.  Yes, Will, you were just like Ansel Adams’ cheeky replacement. I liked his photos, but had stopped using him when he raised his rates the last time from $2,300 to $3,000.  Remember it was pretty ridiculous for me to spend $900 in 2003.

When I found him he was shooting escorts for Eros Guide and his only “fetish” photo was a man in a mask eating some girl out.  Soon, Santillo fancied himself to be quite the “edgy” fetish photographer, but it was mostly of me.  He did go on to shoot some other dommes, namely my former LA contemporaries Mistress Gemini and Georgia Payne and some of my NYC colleges. Funny thing, these were photos of pretty girls in fetish gear or ones that looked…just…like….mine. Georgia and I had conversation in 2008 about how Will never had any ideas that he was just rehashing mine. 

He needed me, and I liked his photos, so I agreed to do some TFP shoots with him and we got some great shots.  He still needed more and Taschen Books was breathing down his neck. So, I caved.  I gave him permission.

Comedy in my Wall St living room.

Tragedy in my living room

Late in 2008 Will came to me with a proposition. He would “let” me play with him so he could understand it better.  (Yes, our big bad fetish photographer had yet to ever experience kinky play.) He gave me a list of limits that included nothing inserted, no pain and anything I did to him he got to do with me and I would have to be in the same amount of undress as he was.  Wow, as enticing as that sounded, I turned it down.  For some reason since he was now photographing me for “free” he seemed to think I should provide my professional services for free and since we were friends include things that weren’t ever on the menu.

Eventually Taschen Books ended up canning Santillo’s books.  Will, undaunted, decided to self publish, besides he could now have ALL the profit because every person was going to have a big book of M on their coffee table.  Unfortunately, that meant Will would have to do his own promotion. Fortunately, Skin Two was just changing it’s formant and liked Will’s photos.  Unfortunately, Will didn’t see fit to give me modeling credit.

“I was the one who set up the deal with Woodward!” He told me. Of course, why should I get anything out of the deal.

I emailed Tim Woodward, whom I had met several years before, but the book was already in print.  It was done.

Santillo contacted me a while back.  He has a warehouse full of unsold coffee table books and is going in a different direction.  He has a Tumblr Page where he polices the badlands of Tumblr making sure everyone gives him credit for his photos—could care less about the modles. 

I think he printed all three of his series.  I don’t have any copies, though I did eventually purchase my own copy of the Skin Two Fetish Yearbook 2009.