The Pioneer of Bondage Photography Charles-François Jeandel and His Blue Women

Imagine an amateur photographer in the 1890s... Though the process is far more complicated than it would be a hundred years later, this enthusiastic man takes pictures of all ordinary things he sees around himself, using the most affordable technique called cyanotype. Its printing formulation is sensitive to the blue-light spectrum, which means, in his portfolio, the amateur has blue landscapes, blue churches, blue ladies and gentlemen, blue cats, and more blue cats. You may catch yourself already humming that song about a blue man in a blue world. However, the story of this man is way more obscure and intriguing, as he seems to be an older Western colleague of Ito Seiu, "the father of modern kinbaku."

Fig. 1. Charles Jeandel, from the front, left hand on hip, between 1890 and 1900 

Fig. 2. Woman looking in the mirror, 1890-1900

Fig. 3. Two cats on the chair, 1890-1900

Fig. 4. Pensive woman, 1890-1900

Fig. 5. Pensive nude, 1890-1900

Fig. 6. Tied woman in ripped cloth, 1890-1900

Fig. 7. Tied woman in ripped cloth, 1890-1900

Fig. 8. Woman tied to a wooden panel in a seated position, 1890-1900

Fig. 9. Tied seated woman, 1890-1900

Fig. 10. Two tied models, 1890-1900

Fig. 11. Woman on the back tied to a ladder, 1890-1900

Fig. 12. Woman on her stomach tied to a ladder, 1890-1900 

Unnoticed

Charles-François Jeandel was born in 1859 in Limoges and died in 1942 in Angoulême. Besides these dates, it's known that Jeandel failed his career as a Parisian painter in 1889 because his participation in the main cultural event, which was the Saloon of French Artists, remained unnoticed by critics and the audience. After this misfortune, he retired to his family estate in Charente (South West of France) and married Madeleine Castet, 18 years junior. Jeandel was a prominent member of the local Archaeological and Historical Society, a good catholic, and exemplary bourgeois, as they say. 

Fig. 13. Woman tied to the bars with her limbs spread, 1890-1900

Fig. 14. “Crucified” woman, 1890-1900

Fig. 15. Woman tied with her skirt lifted, 1890-1900

Fig. 16. Woman tied with her skirt lifted, 1890-1900

The Human Comedy

His biography looks like a brief episode of The Human Comedy by Honoré de Balzac or a variation of some Russian classics: the young idealist aspires to become an artist; he lacks training and perseverance and spends his time procrastinating in vain yet sweet dreams about his talent and bright perspectives. When he eventually shows some of his finished works to the audience, the predictable zero outcome makes him quit art as it's already too late to study in his thirties. He takes a young bride as compensation for his bad luck and lives happily ever after, hoping that his kids may become artists instead. 

Fig. 17. Tied woman with flagellation scars, 1890-1900 

Fig. 18. Tied woman inside the wooden construction, 1890-1900

Fig. 19. Nude suspended by hands and feet, 1890-1900

Fig. 20. Nude in profile bound by hands and feet, 1890-1900 

The Secret Path

Yet the real comedy started in 1988, four and a half decades after Jeandel's death, when the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, as it's stated in the SMpedia article, received his photo album from an unknown German collector. The album contained the trivial pictures one can find on their smartphones (especially when it comes to cats) and, besides that, 114 bondage shots. One of the two models, who posed for him, is said to be his (future?) wife Madeleine though there's no consensus on it. Supposedly, the shots were taken during Jeandel's stay in Paris in the 1890s. The unlucky artist's experiments turned out to be a secret path to the appreciative audience that posthumously awarded Jeandel the title of the world's first kinbaku photographer.

In the exclusive Premium edition you can discover a close study of Jeandel's influences and similarities to other artists (like Keisai Eisen, Marquis de Sade, and Rubens) an more than three times as much images,

Click HERE for an article on Hans Bellmer and his dark surreal dollhouse.

Sources: pictures are taken from the collection of The Musee’d Orsay (musee-orsay.fr); SMpedia.com; fr.wikipedia.org; aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.blogspot.com; Gilles Neret. Erotica Udniversalis. Taschen. 1994.