NSFW PHOTOESSAY: CRUEL TO BE KIND

Content warning: images that contain nudity, consensual bondage, knife play, needle play, blood play, and degradation. 

CRUEL TO BE KIND

Candy Feit

This project explores the way in which much of our sex, gender, sexuality and sexual pleasure is based in our emotional pleasure. Or displeasure, as the case may be. It has led me to discover how we use our bodies to process cruelty and pain, and how from that pain we can learn to push our limits into some kind of acceptance, or even transcendence.

These photos investigate the connection between pleasure and pain, and how kink can blur the line between where the body ends and the brain begins. It’s all in the moment between the smack, the punch, the pinprick and the slash, and the emotional release that comes when the pain is acknowledged.

We are inundated daily with images of horrific cruelty. And for some, these photos are tough to look at. They’re not erotic or salacious but they are meant to be beautiful. We see a moment of connection between people, someone with a far off look – where are they going in their mind. But more than that there is calm, peace, surrender, awareness, connection, anticipation and realization. There’s the desire to push our bodies and minds, to hold space, to heal and to connect.

As someone I photographed and interviewed for this project said:

“It’s important to recognize that yes, it is consensual trauma on both sides. The person doing it and the person receiving….but the point of that is care, nurture, humanize, communicate, process, love… Putting needles through somebody’s skin is definitely also traumatic for both of those people. But it’s the level of care, connection, and nurture and understanding, communication that are involved, that heal that trauma… We cannot avoid trauma, but what we can do is not get stuck there, and not turn it into something bad. Turn it into something that is empowering, and fortifying, and validating.”

In these images we find something rare and beautiful: the birth of pleasure, and healing, through pain.

Read a longer interview with Candy about the Cruel To Be Kind project and her subjects here!

To learn more about the intention and evolution of this project, check out the Autostraddle interview with photographer Candy Feit published on the main site today.

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Candy Feit

Candy Feit is a documentary photographer and artist who focuses on creating deep narratives about people and their relationships. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, National Geographic Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, Time Magazine and dozens of other publications. After spending the last decade living and working in West Africa and South Asia, Feit is now based in New York.

Candy has written 1 article for us.

12 Comments

  1. i love this so much and am so moved by this work. thank you for trusting us with this project, candy. and thank you to all the subjects who trusted you. i feel immense gratitude to everyone involved and will honestly probably never stop thinking about these images and what they mean to me. <3

  2. candy this is amazing. i am in awe. thank you much to you and everyone who participated in this

  3. this is absolutely incredible. thank you to everyone who made this possible. i feel so honored to see these images.

  6. I get sick with needles & blood, so I appreciate the content warning very much. And also, I wanted to look at these photos, so I tried to focus on how people’s eyes look in the photos. Magical. They really capture the potential tenderness and intimacy of kink.

  8. This is incredibly powerful. “Thank you” doesn’t cover how I feel, but, Thank You, everyone, Candy, Autostraddle, the artists who let us into their intimacy.

    Wow.

  10. i absolutely cannot get this collarbone needle situation out of my head, and i’m definitely thinking p hard about, maybe i should be actually taking some real steps towards exploring kink, if this is fascinating me so much.

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