Irving Klaw was born in Brooklyn, New York into a working class Jewish family, as a child Irving was a homeboy who liked to read and study a lot, he showed an early penchant for collecting books, but like many of that era with humble beginnings he struggled to find his calling. Growing up he tried his hand at different business ventures and eventually after striking out at various businesses he and his sister Paula opened up a bookstore, at 209 E. 14th St. in Manhattan. The year was 1938 and Hollywood was still in its infancy, but as fate would have it he and Paula stumbled upon a cache of early movie stills which they started selling and soon they found out they were a much more lucrative business than the books. Paula recalled that moment in an interview: “One day a junk dealer came in with a couple of cartons of pictures that someone had thrown out. We sorted them and put them out on the stand and found the public showed a big interest in them.” Soon after they had customers coming in requesting more titillating subject matter and a new enterprise was born – creating photos that appealed to a clientele with more extreme tastes. Irving Klaw was a pretty staid man, regular in his habits, and had not much of a personal interest in kink, he was motivated by the prospect of making money, and realized the opportunity that was presented to him, and so he capitalized on it. Although often falsely given credit, Irving Klaw was not in fact the photographer of the imagery attributed to him, but rather the producer, director, fetish visionary who saw the potential of creating an empire around it. He employed outside freelance photographers, and his sister Paula to photograph the models under his tutelage creating a vast body of work.. To be continued..

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