Skin Deep

Skin deep

Scott Lanes' fetish photography has been known to turn some heads - but it's not porn, it's art. Just ask him.

By Dinah Cardin

    There is no room for delicacy when introducing photographer Scott Lanes. If you present him at a party as, "This is Scott Lanes. He's a fetish photographer," Lanes will say "I also do bondage. Nice to meet you," while offering a handshake and a smile.

   This frankness immediately infuses sex into any conversation, as well as some pretty interesting images into the minds of those who are present.

   Lanes, 41, is a fixture about Salem, a happy-go-lucky, enthusiastic puppy dog of a guy, who just so happens to point his camera at naked women. Lots of them.

 Another label for him would be "erotic photographer." It's more artful than porn, though you're not likely to hire him to shoot your son's bar mitzvah.

 And they love him in Europe. This week, in fact, an entire collection of Lanes' photography is going to print at a German publisher, where his book "Real Girls" will be churned out and distributed to places like Barnes and Noble and Borders.

    The book features young women, ages 18 to 24, mostly from Massachusetts and some from the North Shore, in naturally lit, soft and playful settings. Some satisfy the white cotton underwear and T-shirt fantasy, while others reveal downy bellies, bums and natural breasts. Each of them could be the girl next door.

    "People think there's a perfect look to a woman, but they don't see these girls who are around them every day," says Lanes. "I particularly chose regular girls to do this because everyone is so sick of Pam Anderson and fake implants. I didn't want to use conventional models. I just wanted it to be like the girls who sell you coffee at Starbucks or the bank tellers. Regular, everyday girls."

   Published by Goliath Books and translated into several languages, this is the first publication exclusively featuring Lanes' work. He describes it as the next incarnation of the pin-up girls of the 1950s. It's something a little naughty, but not a lot.

    "It's definitely more sexy, it's definitely more naked, it's definitely more edgy," than the now seemingly tame pin-up girls, exposing very little, "but it would be OK to bring it out and show your friends," he says.

    It's a departure from his usual work, which is playful in an entirely different way. This darker work features more aggressive-looking women in black latex, sometimes leading one another around on a leash. It's a world of blindfolds, platform shoes, piercings and leather.

    Lanes has been featured in shows in Chicago and New York, has shot book covers and publishes his work on Web sites with names like fatalbeauty.com.

    A former photographer for the Salem News, Lanes began the darker work in 1991, around the same time he began dating his wife of 11 years, who owns the local day spa Laura Lanes Skin Care.

     The couple has lived in Salem for a decade, owns a home here and is active in local Chamber of Commerce and community events.

Before opening her business, Laura Lanes helped out her husband as the makeup artist on the set.

   "I was almost immune to it. I was part of the process," she says.

Now, her business takes her attention elsewhere. "You get a little jealous. It goes in waves," she says. "He hasn't run off with any of the models yet."

   Still, photographing hundreds of naked women is just something Scott Lanes does. When he started the bondage photography, his proud mother took prints to the bank where she worked to show her co-workers.

Witch City cameo

    Lanes says he gets e-mails all the time from girls who want to model for him. Some of them get paid for a particular project and some do it for their portfolios. After photographing some 200 nude young women, it's almost non-sexual, he says.

    "It's more about the form and the light and the body. I don't want to elevate it to the level of the David or anything, but it would be more like if I was sculpting a woman. It's not like there's a physical attraction to a sculpture. It's not like I'm setting it up to partake in it."

   In the '90s, Lanes often visited the hardcore clubs in Boston and New York, where he was allowed to bring in a camera to capture the underworld of dominance and submission happening long after midnight. He inhabited a loft in Boston, where he hosted legendary parties and religiously followed edgy bands, where he met his musician wife.

    With an earring, all-black clothes and combat boots, Lanes retains a punk look reminiscent of those days. The West Peabody native discovered photography in high school and found it was a way to fit in with different cliques, while still remaining just on the fringe as a voyeur.

    One of his photographs, taken when he was just a teenager, has been getting a lot of attention lately. The local shop Pamplemousse has been selling black T-shirts with Lanes' photo of an old Salem movie theater's marquee advertising showings of "King Kong" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

    Salem appears as the perfect backdrop in much of Lanes' darker work. The claw-foot tub and sink in a bathroom above the abandoned Bowman's Bakery on Essex Street appears to be the site of illicit behavior, when an Endicott College student of giraffe-like proportions perches here and there, staring out of the black-and-white images with a look of raw beauty.

   The concrete bunker-like depth chargers found on Winter Island can be glimpsed behind a model in one photo, while in another the civilized streets of the McIntire District counter the latex and blue hair of a vixen. A dining room table on Chestnut Street is dominated by a womanly force beneath the crystal chandelier.

   His funky studio, above the shops of the pedestrian mall on Essex Street, has the quirky touch of an old bank vault. In the corner is a lifetime supply of baby oil for slicking up the models and a bottle of Astroglide for the comfortable donning of latex.

Shock and awe

    This career of choice has also taken Lanes away, to early-morning shoots in a room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, where the end result is an Asian woman, bound and crouching in the corner of a bathroom. It has also led to burlesques shots in fancy clubs.

    Much of this work is seen, though, in the glossy magazines of London and Frankfurt - places where sexy photography isn't taboo. In this country, several times he has made the cover of Prometheus, which touts itself as the official magazine of consensual dominance and submission.

    "To 75 percent of America, it just gets lumped into other porn and I fully realize this," he says of his style of photography, "but to those who have an open mind to look at things, those people would look at my work and not know to be horrified or enlightened."

   America's preoccupation with sex, and alternately with snuffing it out, is the reason erotic photography gets overlooked as something of beauty, says Lanes, who proceeds to elaborate on a subject he has clearly given a great deal of thought: America's unhealthy attitude toward sex, and the subsequent bad behavior of teenagers who are uneducated about sexuality and, therefore, make bad decisions.

   Just this week, Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe wrote about the "pornification" of America. The article suggested that sexual expression by young girls, often on the Internet, gets mixed up with sexual empowerment, and the country's conservative Right, or Puritanical bent, actually winds up feeding the appetite for porn.

   There is a difference between hardcore porn and openness toward nudity and an expression of sexuality, says Lanes, but "conservatives" he says, lump it all into one.

   "It's like prohibition and saying all drinking is bad all the time in all cases," he says. "It's just not true. Every day, you get another story of kids hitting puberty young and having sex younger. How much worse could it be if they had an image in front of them? You don't see this in Europe. There is more understanding of sex at an earlier age. The market over there is just way more receptive to my way of thinking."

   Some of the photographer's work would be common art or advertising seen on the sides of buses or billboards in Paris and other European cities. Here, however, even the Boston Phoenix, in its adult section, touched up one of Lanes' photographs.

   "We are not supposed to look at nudity, not supposed to think about sex and not supposed to like anything sexy," says Lanes, who is launching a new Web site featuring the photos that didn't make the book and a discussion board to start an ongoing dialogue about the erotic community.

   Privately, people love his work. There are sprawling homes in Marblehead opened up for sets, and models from Swampscott.

   "Given enough naked 19-year-old girls, I could take over the world," says Lanes. "They'll give you anything."

   Because he knows just how intriguing his life is to most, Lanes is casually pursuing a film about himself, documenting his process, including taped interviews with the models.

   Since he is also seemingly inexhaustible in his interests and energy, Lanes is also making a documentary about the various aspects of the occult in Salem. He and a friend were seen lowering a boom microphone over the action and protests surrounding the Samantha Stephens statue in Salem last spring.

   The European photo editors Lanes works with appreciate the architecture and the tone of Salem, as they add an element of branding to his work, he says.

"Small seaside towns tend to be stuffy, but with all the occult stuff and the witchcraft, there's this dark undercurrent that everything is OK," he says. "You gotta go a long way to be the weirdest guy in Salem."

View Scott Lanes' work at www.scottlanes.com. _

 This article originally appeared in the North Shore Sunday in Massachusetts on Jan. 29.