Christine Kessler saw an opening for a webmaster that fetish models lacking the support of a techy husband or boyfriend could trust. She began, under the label of Perv City, to build and run models’ sites and to shoot a proportion of their content, for a handsome cut of the revenue.
She started hosting my website in mid-2003 and I turned it into a pay site the following year. At that point Perv City was hosting individual sites for several models, including KumiMonster and Persephone. (Both models would later abandon these partnerships, allegedly for reasons that seemed not dissimilar to my own.)
But for a few years after 2003, Christine and I created some amazing work together. I was always based in NYC but would come out to LA to work and stay with her a couple of times a year.
In 2006, she started shooting for Godsgirls.com and for a while she spent more of her time focusing on that than on her personal collaborations with models, until that gig ended.
Christine Kessler published two solo photography books, Pervy Girls and Nylon Girls, with Goliath in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and had a monthly column in Bizarre magazine for a while.
Somewhere around this time, her business and financial problems also began. She borrowed money to purchase a group of profitable websites that had already been using a lot of her content.
It looked like a sensible move, but she started to fall down on the upkeep of the sites, an essential part of the deal.
Attempts by various friends and associates to step in and do the necessary site updating came to nought, and in the end the business failed, leading to a court action against her by her then partner who had guaranteed the loan.
It became more and more difficult for anyone to connect with her by telephone or e-mail and dozens of her model collaborators found they could not get the work she owed them.
I and some others probably stuck around longer than we should have because we still cared and didn’t want to see her slip further — and because some of us still hoped to get the work that we were owed.
Eventually, after months of unpaid bills, Steen’s hosting company pulled the plug on her.
In September 2010 I finally told her that I had to cut all personal ties with her. She refused my request to work together to resolve the business issues we needed to address in order to split, and I became resigned to probably never recovering the work I’d put so much creative energy into during that period.
It was an excruciating decision to turn my back on Christine and walk away. She never tried to contact me again and we never spoke again.
People act shocked and judgmental when they hear she’d developed a drug problem, but to be honest, many of those same people have done or were doing those exact same drugs at some point in their lives.
Recreational drug use/abuse isn’t exactly new to our scene, and for a period of time it was fairly rampant in certain circles. Some people can quit it while others cannot.
I don’t know if it was ‘the drugs’ that changed her completely or whether they just intensified problems and behaviours that already existed.
But it is very sad that, after being such a creative pioneer and helping to establish the careers of so many models who became fetish household names, Christine Kessler ended up hurting so many of those same models — people who had trusted her, and without whom her body of work and her legacy would not have been possible.
The decision to turn my back on Christine and walk away was excruciating. She never tried to contact me again and we never spoke again
Thursday, 5 June 2014
Christine Kessler provided the first ever cover story for The Fetishistas, fronting the March 2007 edition that officially launched a new British fetish media brand.
After nearly a year in development, my new online magazine was being finalised for publication while I was actually in Christine’s home city of Los Angeles, and it went live as the doors opened at Slave2Fashion, the kick-off party of the 2007 LA Kink Ball Weekend.
Her vibrant photography, featuring the hottest fetish stars from California and beyond behaving badly — but cutely — in colourful latex and other slinky attire, perfectly captured the new female-driven fetish style that I intended The Fetishistas to champion.
So the fact that Steen had also just had her first book — Pervy Girls — published by Goliath and I had contributed its foreword just made the decision to give her the first cover story all the more of a no-brainer.
The close-up shot of a hooded Emily Marilyn, one of the book’s many great pictures, was the strongest possible visual statement I could make about the kind of imagery that would differentiate Fetishistas visuals from the rules I had worked under at Skin Two.
And it also acknowledged how important the work of Los Angeles models and photographers had become in pushing the boundaries of the fetish genre.
Christine Kessler was part of a well-integrated creative kink community in LA that included other accomplished photographers such as Steve Diet Goedde and Perry Gallagher, and an ever-growing pool of feisty fetish modelling talent who either lived in LA or visited whenever they could to shoot with the top names.
We’d already been friends for some time, as I’d published her earlier work in Skin Two and had made several pilgrimages to the LA scene in preceding years.
So by the time The Fetishistas launched in 2007, I felt like Steen and her creative circle were part of my extended family. Each of my visits generally included at least one major social get-together in which she was significantly involved.
These might happen at her house, or a nearby Korean restaurant, or might even (when sufficient alcohol had been consumed) take the form of human shopping-cart racing in the aisles of a local supermarket.
One year, there was a full-scale party generously thrown for me by mine host, Perry Gallagher, at the studio Christine shared with Ashley Fontenot.
I remember very clearly that it leaked across the yard to where Persephone and Tim Polecat lived — and what had started out as a brief social call by me turned into a spin-off event in its own right. Those were the days.
Christine Kessler was always quiet, and it reinforced the impression of shyness most people assumed.
She was certainly disarmingly modest about her talents as a photographer, and this made her a delight to deal with in my job as an editor.
She never refused any request for pictures, and would always swiftly provide exactly the tech spec that was requested — a skill not all photographers naturally possess.
But once you got to know her, you would discover that behind that quiet demeanour and those bright blue eyes was a wit that was scalpel-sharp. She could sum someone up and put them down in a single sentence without ever raising her voice.
It was a shock around four years ago to be tipped off by a friend that if you clicked on MyFetishDiary.com, one of the two personal sites where Steen showcased her work, you landed instead on some kind of Christianity-powered holding page.
The presumption at the time was that Christine Kessler’s kinky home must have been hacked by a bunch of God-botherers. So it would surely only be a matter of time before things got back to abnormal. But they didn’t.
Then, from time to time, further snippets would come my way from various friends in LA who were also close to the photographer.
When I eventually heard from a reliable source that Steen had become a crystal meth addict, I was gobsmacked. Nothing about the Christine Kessler I had known had prepared me for that — she just didn’t seem like the kind of person such a thing could happen to.
But it offered an explanation for what had been going on with her web-mastering and site-hosting businesses, and made sense of the growing clamour from models, many big fetish names among them, whose websites had become inaccessible to them and/or gone offline.
More stories would dribble through about legal disputes, mortgage foreclosure hearings… and a new all-time low when this one-time beacon of fetish creativity was arrested for shoplifting.
Hearing such stuff about someone you were fond of, you hope they’ll turn the corner, get back on the right track. But some people don’t manage it, and that’s what looks to have happened with Christine.
The story is that it ended with an overdose that was not accidental.
Most of us, whether we knew Christine Kessler in person or just by her wonderful work, would surely have wished for a better outcome than that.
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