Bound Leather zine: crafting a collective portrait of today's leather community

Bound Leather zine offers a fascinating portrayal of today’s leather community: artful, hot, empathetic and real just like the leathers. It’s a reminder of the many meanings of leather: a source of erotic energy, a fetish, an aesthetic with history and something which unites an incredibly diverse community of people worldwide.

NYC-based photographer Steven Harwick started Bound Leather in 2017. Previously, in his photography studies, he focused on the mid-century Americana aesthetic from the ‘50s and 60s. ”Leather seemed like another avenue within the mid-century bubble, those Physique Pictorial magazines, Bob Mizer photographs or Tom of Finland drawings that I have been obsessed with forever,” he remembers. Interpreting this classic leather aesthetic as something contemporary that could represent the community today was one of his original goals. Four years on, Bound Leather zine has turned into a mesmerising collection of portraits of people living their truth, their pleasure, queerness and beauty in leather.

Below, I talk to Steven about the roots of his interest in leather, the idea of inclusivity in the community, showing his work in the gallery space – and why this whole thing never gets old.

What was behind your decision to start this project as a printed zine?

It was important to me to make a tangible item because of the correlation with the original magazines which inspired me that would get mailed to you in a brown paper bag. It’s the romanticism that comes with nostalgia, but also the harsh reality of why that had to happen. I wanted it to be a print thing that people could find in stores or order or have in their house or hide in a sock drawer. Also beyond the excitement of holding a physical thing and the beauty of the printed image as opposed to being lit by the blue screen of your phone, I think it has the potential to be uncensored and far more radical than online content these days.

Leather is a lot of things: sexual fetish, community, queer history… How did your interest in leather emerge and why did you decide to dedicate the whole publication to it?

It is one of those things that is really interesting to think about in retrospect in terms of inherent attraction. I have memories of being super young, pre-sexual, just like a kid – and being attracted to leather if somebody was wearing it. It's been a constant in my life since then, and then during my internet-kind of maturing, I found more and more things that pointed to it being a thing that other people were into and it being a sexual fetish as on top of an aesthetic or tactile attraction. It felt like a natural exploration to pursue it photographically since that's the way that I know how to interact with the world – having the desire to create these images or tell these stories or make these worlds that I want to be in and make things that I want to see.

What is your process like? Do you mostly reach out to people to photograph or do people reach out to you?

In the beginning, I have found a lot of people through Recon, which is a gay fetish app. And since my Instagram grew a bit, it’s a bit of both – it's been fun to find people in other countries and cities, even people who are visiting New York and have a couple of hours to come by and have some photos taken. Before shooting we chat I see what stuff they own. I have a small leather closet with a range of different sizes that I can use to fill in the gaps – if they don't have a jacket or chaps, and the ones I have happen to fit them and they've always wanted to shoot in them. I'm open to mixing and matching my stuff, their stuff, new stuff, old stuff. I kind of straddle the line between documenting and fully self-curated portraiture. I like people coming over and shooting in what they're comfortable in doing stuff they're comfortable doing. I tailor my world around them and make the space to photograph them in that way.

Do you have any particular books or magazines or artists who inspire you visually?

I love a photo book. I collect them and have a ton. I think I'm working towards making one soon. I love Karlheinz Weinberger and his photos of rebel youth in Switzerland, which looks like a bastardised version of Americana because they were Europeans looking up to 1950s Americana – it's like a John Waters movie basically. Annie Sprinkle put out a deck of playing cards with all these people in her life reimagined as jokers or kings or queens. I also watch a lot of movies, classics like David Lynch. Older movies too, like Italian horror movies from the ‘60s and ‘70s. I look at everything. I look and listen to everything. I'm very I don't know… It's not uncritical, I just can find something that gives me pleasure in everything.

I love that you photograph people of different genders – historically the leather community representation has been very male-dominated. Is it something you actively think about while making work?

I guess going back to the origin of the project, one thing that was huge for me is that looking at the well-known leather publications and photographers, I didn't really see myself in those photos. I'm fully aware that Tom of Finland drawings, or Bob Mizer photographs offer a take on masculinity in which the muscular body type is blown to absurd proportions. But that being said, I’ve never seen fat people of different body types represented anywhere, let alone black people or people of colour – so many people under-represented or not represented at all.

I think every single person is attractive. There's no hierarchy. I like shooting everybody: men, women, people of all genders. Everybody brings their own interpretation of what fetish means to them. I think it's important to explore all facets of it.

You’ve had your work displayed in the gallery context in New York and Berlin – how do you like this experience compared to the zine or showing your work online?

I love the gallery context because the opportunity to work three-dimensionally is really exciting to me. The installation that I did in Brooklyn for my solo show had a fence with a leather jacket hanging from it and boots at the base of it and a TV and a cigar and an ashtray – kind of like my fantasy room. Having a leather jacket in the space was also important. Both at my solo show in New York and in Berlin and shows I’ve done before I loved doing installations incorporating video on a screen or a TV set within a room which I’ve curated. It gives me that level of control that I desperately need. To be able to put a person in the space itself is really fun, and control what they're hearing and seeing and the soundtrack and the vibe of the room and the lighting. I really love doing that. And it’s not that this is even a 2021 concern, but it is nice to have the validation of seeing what one could consider pornography is suitable for a gallery.

Do you find that young people seem to have more interest in leather and kink these days? Or is it hard to tell?

I think so. I feel like kink and leather and latex have been put in the spotlight and worn on red carpets. As an aspect of pop culture, it is not as taboo to have Kim Kardashian in full latex, or pop stars performing in looks that might resemble a dominatrix. In terms of people that actually are interested in it from a sexual or fetishistic viewpoint, I think it is getting younger.

I feel like there is always the tension between old and new. As someone so enamored with the origins and the beginnings of semi-public leather culture, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I am deeply referential of the “old guard”, the concepts of rules of kink and Dom/sub relationships and things like that. But I also know that for the young generation there's a lot more fluidity and openness like never before. But I definitely think there's room for everybody. I have played and had experiences with and shot people from a lot of different generations and a lot of different experiences. And I think everybody's just excited: newcomers are excited that there's so much stuff that is new to them, and older generations are excited that new people are going to be able to keep it going.

Follow Bound Leather zine on instagram and order your copy here.