To those who did not know Christine Kessler personally, but who were familiar with her body of work, I hope to give a glimpse of her as both an artist and a human being, flaws and all, who left behind a legacy of powerful and iconic fetish imagery that helped to inspire and shape an entire generation of fetish photographers, models, artists and designers.

Christine, or ‘Steen’ to those of us who knew her, was a woman filled with great talent and intense passion. She was loved and very much adored by many of us who, at one time or another, had the honour of calling her a close, trusted friend and collaborator.

But she also struggled with deeply personal demons, which unfortunately in her final years took an increasingly heavy toll not only on her but on many of her close friends.  Because of this, sadly, at the time of her death she was estranged from many of her former models and friends, myself included.

Steen was the sum of many parts and to deny any of her pieces is to do her memory a grave disservice. She was famous for ‘telling it like it is’ with her friends, so I will attempt to do her memory the same honour by not glossing over the darker parts of her life and personality that ultimately led to her demise.

I don’t claim that what follows is a comprehensive overview of her life, but hopefully it will at least provide some pertinent insights.

I first became aware of Christine Kessler’s work in the early noughties, while I was the online photo editor of Penthouse magazine in New York.

I was actively exploring the fetish/BDSM culture in NYC and quickly assimilated the work of photographers such as Eric Kroll, Richard Kern, Doris Kloster and Charles Gatewood, and contemporaries of theirs who appeared in publications like “O”, Secret, Skin Two and Marquis.

I had already done a fair amount of modelling, but it had mostly been along the lines of goth or punk. Then I worked with NYC photographer Michelle Serchuk on a bondage shoot with Midori (in 2001, I think), and that is where I consider my actual fetish career to have started.

Having my interest piqued by Midori’s work led me to discover the photography of Steve Diet Goedde. And from there, via a mistress friend and various Livejournal conversations with fetish people around the world, I finally encountered the work of Christine Kessler.

Immediately I felt a personal connection with her images that was stronger than any I’d felt with other photographers’ work.

I was drawn to the way she photographed her subjects: her angles, her lighting, and the way she was able to shoot even heavy BDSM scenes while retaining a degree of softness, intimacy and beauty that seemed natural and distinctly feminine — a quality I’d rarely seen before within the genre.

Her work was colourful and her styling was lush, yet her images didn’t have the stagnant feel of overproduced Porn Valley studio content. Her subjects during that time were models and scene players who seemed genuinely connected to the subject matter being portrayed through her lens.

Quite simply, her work felt emotionally invested from all sides of the camera. While glamorous, her images and subjects still felt genuine. These weren’t people play-acting or pretending for the sake of notoriety; these were images born out of actual desire for personal exploration.

What also struck me about Steen’s work is that she didn’t seem to shy away from models who were different or unusual or had piercings and crazy-coloured hair — as I did at the time.

So, when the desire to document and creatively express my fetishistic sexual evolution on film finally turned into a need, and I made plans to visit Los Angeles for the purpose of embarking on this new creative journey, Christine Kessler was one of the first photographers I contacted about a possible collaboration.

When she responded to my email that she wanted to set up a shoot, I was elated. It was March 2003 and I was pretty much brand new, and unknown in the fetish universe beyond the NYC club scene.

At that time my website, Darenzia.net had few professionally-shot galleries and was mostly filled with the kind of self-shot stuff that everyone now puts in their Facebook albums.

I honestly hadn’t expected a response from her and I certainly didn’t imagine that eventually I’d wind up making an entire career as a fetish model and that Christine Kessler would be the number one person who made that career possible.

It should be noted here that like most artists, Christine’s style of photography evolved and changed greatly over the years. The majority of the work she was producing in the years before 2001/2 when I became aware of her was a lot grittier, mostly monochrome, shot on film and focusing on the heavier side of BDSM — much of it involving gay leathermen.

I hadn’t expected a response from her and I certainly didn’t imagine that eventually I’d wind up making an entire career as a fetish model

After we became friends, she showed me a lot of this earlier work, but my in-depth knowledge of her oeuvre really begins with what she was producing for her two main (now defunct) websites MyFetishDiary.com and ToeandArch.com — the focus of her energies at the time I first became aware of her.

When I finally met Christine for our first shoot, I had no idea what to expect, as she tended not to appear in pictures herself. The person who emerged from the old Camino that drew up outside my friend’s house in Los Angeles was heavily tattooed and mohawked.