When I discovered the vintage kink images, I wanted to know the who, when, and where. After exploring, my findings were more meaningful than I would have guessed.

The photographers were Jacques (born 1887; died c. 1942) and Charles Biederer (born 1892; died c. 1942), from Moraska-Ostrava, Czechoslovakia   . They owned Ostra photo studios and were located in Paris, 33 boulevard du Temple. They published their photos in the Éditions Ostra during the 1920’s and 30’s, with erotic images focused on artistic nudes, BDSM, and sexual fetishes.  Jacques and Charles additionally produced a series of  remarkable and purely fetishistic silent movies depicting scenes of dominance and submission, a mistress disciplining her slave; the film Dressage au fouet.

During the 1920’s, women who outweighed men in population due to the war, were changing the previously held social norms which fostered somewhat of a sexual revolution. In the changing roles of women and sexuality, the role of the queer women became more publicly noticed. It became a home to a thriving lesbian subculture.

Watch one of the first fetish stage films created: Dressage au fouet

https://youtu.be/k5-JPtGV8Ec

The Biederer brothers, who were Jewish, died in 1942 in the German Concentration Camps.