Dominas documents the stories of individuals working as professional dominatrixes in Germany. This project utilizes the genre of portrait photography to probe the medium’s function as an instrument of power. Consisting of three homogeneous parts, this book brings together large scale portraits of women working professionally in the BDSM industry. It combines these images with a selection of statements excerpted from interviews with these women as conducted by the artist, alongside imagery from a Google search using the keyword »Dominatrix«. Pairing the personal experience and appearance of these women with iconography mass-produced by and for the porn industry examines the mechanisms of perception in the digital age. Dominas can be read as a multidimensional collage, as a visual study on both sadomasochistic aesthetics and the conventions of presentation and representation, and as a reflection on the triangulation among power structures, social critique, and the questioning of existing values and hierarchies.
