A National Guard facility. A professional boxing venue. A Star Wars shooting location. And now, most recently, a massive online fetish porn factory. The San Francisco Armory has a history befitting its Moorish, lost-in-time exterior. It’s also the backdrop of photographer Elizabeth Moran’s porn-sans-porn photo project, The Armory.
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Without knowing what the photos are, there’s little to give away that they’re film sets at Kink.com, an online pornography company. There are small hints, but nothing screams sex.
“I like that you know something is off even though it feels familiar,” says Moran. “The bedroom kinda looks like my bedroom, the kitchen sorta looks my kitchen. It has a kind of off-putting normalcy.”
Kink.com is the world’s largest producer of BDSMand fetish pornography in the world and is housed in the 200,000-square-foot Armory building on San Francisco’s Mission Street. The building was initially built for the National Guard in 1912, but in the 1920s it also became a sports venue — hosting several prizefight boxing matches — earning it the nickname “the Madison Square Garden of the West.” Later the building was used to shoot some of the pyrotechnic and spaceship-interior scenes from the original Star Wars movies.
The San Francisco Armory. Photo: Robbert Michel/Flickr
Moran has been working on The Armory for almost a year after she moved from the East Coast to pursue a graduate degree at the California College of the Arts. New to San Francisco, she was drawn to the building as a subject for its implausible history. Even though the soldiers and boxers are gone, for her their presence lingers — just as the porn actors’ presence lingers in her photos.
“I’ve been thinking about how the site contains all these histories but we can only see the top layer,” she says. “With my photography I’m trying to dig into those layers.”
As menacing and secretive as the building looks from the outside, its denizens have gone to great pains to be transparent and give access to media. Some residents protested the website’s decision to use the armory because they were worried about how it would affect the neighborhood. But Michael Stabile, a spokesperson for the company, says Kink.com has worked hard to be dispel people’s fears. Instead of just producing pornography, the company says it’s trying to “demystify and celebrate alternative sexualites.” There are tours for the public and James Franco was just allowed access to shoot a behind-the-scenes documentary called Kink.
“We’ve always opened the doors of the armory to photographers and filmmakers, because we want people to understand that, even if what we do can seem shocking, really it’s just a bunch of like-minded people getting together to put on a show,” Peter Acworth, the founder Kink.com, told Wired.
Moran says she’s been welcomed by the crew at Kink.com and eventually wants turn the project into a book. Acworth, says he’s been happy to have Moran at Kink because he can appreciate the way her photos contribute to a broader understanding of what goes on behind the walls of the armory.
“We loved Elizabeth’s approach, which I think shows that behind all the fantasy of the Kink is a world that is, in many ways, very normal,” he says. “People tend to be blinded by sex, and Elizabeth’s photos really cut through that.”
Photo Gallery: Elizabeth Moran
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