Natasha Gornik is a kink photographer, writer, and fetishist based out of New York City. She’s been one of my favorite artists for a few years now. Her vignettes featuring photographs and stream-of-consciousness writing, featured mainly on her blog, fascinate, titillate, and terrify me. The two of us chatted in my apartment in Brooklyn, along with illustrator Jayel Draco, to talk about kink, porn, intimacy, obviousness, and—of course—food.
Are you a kinky person who is a photographer, or did your photography lead you into kink?
I remember being very young, like three or four, and thinking about Cinderella, the actual cartoon character, being tied up in my closet. And, for better or worse, I have a very good memory from when I was young. I remember that, and I remember feeling a tingling. There was something that I liked about it. I remember being confused about that. And I did really kinky things when I was a kid. I would masturbate to the thought of Han Solo being strangled. You know, I worked with what I had. I would play Princess Leia, you know that scene where she’s with Jabba the Hut, and I think it’s Han Solo that whisks her away, and they swing over something. I loved that feeling of being this woman kind of held captive, in the slutty outfit, and being saved. That feeling of being almost constrained in a way. I enjoyed that. So these kinky things have been going on forever in my head. I think I was born kinky.
How did you come to be a fetish photographer as an adult?
We lived in the city of Chicago, and then we moved to Burbank, Illinois, when I was in fourth grade, and my world went to shit. Because Burbank, Illinois, is just uneventful. It lacks substance and color and depth and imagination…It’s like strip malls, but worse, if that’s possible. I went to extremes, and I already had this kink in me—unbeknownst to me at the time. So when I was in my first year at Columbia College, I was seventeen, and there was the Reader, which is kind of like the Village Voice for Chicago. And in the back, there was the ads, like for strippers and dominatrixes. I remember one ad. It said, “WORSHIP OUR GODDESSES’ FEET.” In capitalized letters. Period. And then it went on to describe all the ways that you could worship the feet: stockinged feet, smelly feet, pedicured toes…I don’t even know if I knew what a pedicure was when I was seventeen. But I read it, and there was something about that I really was into. And then at the end it said, “Now hiring,” with a 312 number. So I decided to call. I was still living with my parents at the time, and that’s when I started working at the dungeon. And that was a whole fucking monster of a story.
I would love to hear that story, if you want to tell it.
Well, I called, and this person answered. It was actually a guy, but he used an electronic voice manipulator. It was this crackly feminine voice, and she told me her name was Christine…So I went in, and we had tryouts.
It was me and two other girls who couldn’t have been much older than me. It was probably between seventeen and twenty. We had to take off our shirts, and we were wearing bras. And he gave us a pair of pantyhose each, and a little green plastic army figurine. And then he took out a video camera and said, “Okay, I want you to put the army figure into the stocking, and then laugh maniacally.” It was so weird. But I did it, because I was like a little sheep. And I was always up for an experience….So there were three of us laughing maniacally and putting this fucking figurine into stockings. I don’t think we even used our feet. It was odd. I don’t even know what the fetish is. I still don’t know what the fetish is. I guess I made it; I got a session….My first session was [with] this wrestling fetish guy. So I got shoved into a room with this guy, and he was really big. Like 250 pounds. And I had to wrestle him. It ended up where pretty much dommed me, which maybe was his thing. But I had never done this before, so I was like, “Am I doing all right?” Scissoring his head here with my cute little creamy seventeen-year-old thighs around him, and he’s like, “Yeah! Good! A little harder!” Looking up, I’m sure, at my underwear. So that was hilarious. And I had zero training. Nobody took me under their wing. Now I’m a firm believer in training and mentors when it comes to BDSM practice, especially professional. So anyway, it went from there. I didn’t stop. I saw a few more clients. And then I stopped domming and I was more interested in just being in the room, but I didn’t know how to do that without being a pro domme, so I started bringing the camera in.
I don’t actually know how voyeurs work in a pro session. Did you get paid to show up?
In a way. I wasn’t getting paid monetarily for photography for a long time, but I was getting paid in other ways. I was really into it. I always felt like the dude getting fisted by the other dude in the corner was like a comfy sweater to me. I thought it was super-hot to be in the room with these people that are playing. It wasn’t even necessarily that I liked the urine, the golden showers, or that I liked the foot fetish. It was just the idea, the concept of being in this room with these people who are playing with taboo, in what I learned was a very healthy fashion. It felt really cozy for me. And it was hot. I was very stimulated. I think I actually learned all kink and fetish through photographing, or being in the room, or videoing. Not by actually doing it.
So there’s this other element to your photography, which is food. The way that you do food photography is very sexual. How did you get into food photography, and was it always linked with sex?
I looked down at this piece of fish once. I’ll never forget it. It was around Christmastime a few years back, and I was just blown away by the beauty of that fish, and the experience that was attached to it. So for me, the food was never about the food. It was about the presentation of life, and how I was literally turned into a child again.
Truth be told, what actually happened was that I had a financial slave who was giving me a fuck-ton of money, so I was able to really live it up. And that’s when I started shooting food more, because I was like, reborn. All of my senses were heightened, and I was having a lot of amazing food and a lot of amazing sexual experiences….So I started writing about it, and it was all interconnected, because the meal had happened within the timeframe of this experience. And food is so beautiful. And I also, when I see things, I often view it as food. Or texture. Or color. Like, when I was in Prague, I saw hard-shelled, pastel, pink Easter candy everywhere. It’s only in my brain that they go together….I also hate the obvious. So I try to be as un-obvious as possible.
You’re a photographer of objects and food and people, but your interaction with them is personal. How do you photograph something that you’re looking at as an image, when you feel a connection to it?
I think that’s why intimacy is so important within the photograph, for me. Because it is objectification. As a voyeur, you are objectifying the thing in front of you, because you’re eroticizing this object…whether it be a shoe or a person or eyes. Intimacy is important. My fetish is there, which is being a voyeur to this object, which titillates me. And then I also need to find something deeper behind it so that there’s meaning to it, right? So in a sense, that intimacy is important for it to be a full, rounded thing. I don’t feel the same way about food. I look at food as an object, like, I feel comfortable looking at a pretty cupcake and getting turned on and not having to talk to it.
When I’m looking at your photographs, there’s a strong feeling, not of destruction, but of the idea of destruction.
That goes along with everything I was saying about the non-obvious. It’s trying to capture that feeling or moment….It’s such a high, and it’s stimulating. How do you make a picture of an emotion that’s about to happen or that just happened? For me, it’s easy to shoot someone being caned. Because I’ve done that a lot in my lifetime. But trying to get a photograph right about that feeling that happens when everybody’s sighing, and they melt like butter? That’s interesting to me.
I want to talk about Foxhouse Films.
Oh yeah! Let’s talk about that! Foxhouse is amazing! Mistress Alyx started it with three or four [people] to begin with, and it’s pretty much a queer, feminist collective, and they’re making porn. Kinky, queer perverts making porn in New York. It’s all based in New York, at least so for. Everybody who’s in the videos either have already been intimate, or know each other, or there’s already intimacy there, which is what really drew me to it. Because that’s really important to me. Intimacy has become the biggest factor in my art. I don’t know how it really goes with porn in general, like, if it’s just that this actor’s getting paid, that actor’s getting paid, they get together, they get paid, they walk away…
It is often like that.
I feel like you can see that a lot. It’s blatantly obvious that nobody’s having an orgasm. For me, it’s not sincere. And that’s fine because it’s porn… Wait, no, that’s not fine! That’s absolutely not fine! It works for some people, it doesn’t work for me. Foxhouse is all about that level of intimacy, which I’m very comfortable with and I love.
Do you have any shows coming up?
I do. I’m in a group show at Leslie-Lohman Museum called #interface. Walt Cessna is curating it. And it’s me, and I think twenty-eight other artists. It should be fun.
