1900 to 1945: Clinics, Coteries and the First Fetish Photographs

Two things happen to this subject between 1900 and 1945, and they happen almost independently of each other. The medical frame changes hands, passing from forensic psychiatrists writing for courts to psychoanalysts writing for clinicians. Separately, and largely out of sight of the doctors, a commercial visual culture appears: photographs, drawings, magazines, and a postal network connecting people who would otherwise never have met. The second development matters more to what came afterwards. It is also the one with the worse records.

The doctors change

Havelock Ellis got there first. The volume of Studies in the Psychology of Sex containing his essay on love and pain appeared in 1903, and his approach was deliberately different from the one Krafft-Ebing had established. Ellis collected accounts rather than cases, treated the desires as exaggerations of dynamics present in ordinary courtship, and was sceptical that sadism and masochism were opposites at all. He preferred the term algolagnia, which had been proposed in the 1890s precisely to avoid naming a condition after a novelist. It never displaced the older words, and neither did his framing.

Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality followed in 1905 and did displace it. He treated sadism and masochism as two faces of one impulse, turned outward or inward, and this pairing became the standard account for most of the century. He kept revising: a 1924 paper reworked masochism entirely, tying it to the death drive he had proposed a few years earlier. The specific theories have not aged well. The structural change did. After Freud, the question stopped being whether a defendant was responsible for what he had done and became what a desire meant in the history of the person who held it. That shift is the beginning of the long argument traced in the DSM and depathologisation.

Berlin, and what was destroyed there

Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in 1919. It was a genuinely new kind of institution: a clinic and a research library and a public museum, running marriage counselling and legal advocacy alongside an archive of tens of thousands of case files, questionnaires and photographs. Hirschfeld had been campaigning against Germany’s anti-homosexuality law since the 1890s. The Institut gave that campaign a building, a staff and an evidence base.

Nazi students raided it on 6 May 1933. Four days later the contents of its library were burned in one of the public bonfires in central Berlin. Hirschfeld was travelling and never went back; he died in France in 1935. For a historian the loss is not abstract. Most of what the Institut held existed nowhere else, so questions about what people in interwar Europe actually did and said about these desires cannot be answered, and the gap will not close. Any confident account of this period is either working from the fragments that survived elsewhere or making things up.

Photographs, costumes and the post

The visual trade developed on a separate track and left better records, because the records were commercial.

Staged bondage photographs exist from the 1890s. A body of work by the French photographer Charles-François Jeandel, made around the turn of the century and now in a French national collection, shows how early the imagery was being produced and how privately it stayed. In Japan, the artist Seiu Ito is credited within the kinbaku tradition with photographing rope work from about 1919, drawing on Edo-period judicial restraint and on kabuki staging; that account comes largely from inside the tradition and should be read accordingly.

What changed between the wars was distribution. The British weekly London Life handed its correspondence pages to readers writing at length about tight-lacing, boots, rubber and restraint, and those pages functioned as an accidental personals column: people wrote in, people wrote back, addresses were exchanged. Historians read the letters with care, since a good number were probably written by the magazine or by fantasists, but the network they created was real.

In New York, Charles Guyette built the trade into a business, making corsets and boots to order, producing photographs, and selling both by mail from the 1930s. He was prosecuted for obscenity in the middle of that decade, which is the recurring hazard of the whole period: in the United States the post was policed under obscenity statutes dating back to the 1870s, so every part of this economy ran through a channel the state was watching. Guyette later supplied and worked with John Willie, and through him the aesthetic passed directly into the postwar magazines.

The state of things in 1945

By the end of the war the practices had a psychoanalytic vocabulary, a small commercial visual trade operating illegally by post, and no community at all. The doctors and the customers were not in contact. The customers were barely in contact with each other. That changes fast after 1945, and the postwar decades are where it changes, as the same mail-order economy scales up and the first physical spaces appear. The sequence is set out on the full timeline.