BACK WHEN BETTIE PAGE WAS ALL THE RAGE | THE EARLY IRVING KLAW DAYS

In 1949, Bettie Page moved to New York with aspirations of becoming an actress. It was there she met one of America’s first ‘fetish’ photographers, Irving Klaw. From 1952 to 1957, Page worked as a model for Klaw for both his photographs and films, earning her the media nickname, “The Queen of Bondage.”

“For years I had my hair parted down the middle in a ponytail, tucked down around the sides Well, I went and cut the bangs, and I’ve been wearing them ever since. They say it’s my trademark.”

“I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn`t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn`t think of myself as liberated, and I don`t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”

Klaw was targeted during the Kefauver Hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, in which his photographs were claimed to be causing deviance, perversion and violence. Klaw was not charged, but felt compelled to burn his prints and negatives upon returning to New York. What photos survived were saved by his sister Paula. “BETTIE! The Incomparable Bettie Page Archives of Irving Klaw,”is comprised of those images saved by Paula without Irving’s knowledge.

“All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me. She didn’t want girls. She thought we were trouble. She didn’t help with homework or teach me to sew or cook. She didn’t go to the school plays I was in or go to my high school graduation. When I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that.”

In a 1998 interview with Lorelei Sharkely, Page said of that time, “The only bondage posing I ever did was for Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually every other Saturday he had a session for four or five hours with four or five models and a couple of extra photographers, and in order to get paid you had to do an hour of bondage. And that was the only reason I did it. I never had any inkling along that line. I don’t really disapprove of it; I think you can do your own thing as long as you’re not hurting anybody else — that’s been my philosophy ever since I was a little girl. I never looked down my nose at it.”