A photograph by pioneering foot fetish photographer, Elmer Batters.
I felt that people almost saw me as un-American for not mooning over large mammaries.
—Elmer Batters
The work of fetish photographer Elmer Batters was considered so aberrant back in the 1960s that he was actually arrested for pictures he took for his leg and foot-centric fetish photography in his magazines Man’s Favorite Pastime and Black Silk Stockings on the charge of “obscenity.” While many of Batters’ photographs included topless models flashing their breasts the subject of Johnny Law’s ire was Batters’ focus on the models stocking feet.
The fetish model known as ‘Caruska’ on a swing by Elmer Batters.
When Batters was getting his start in the 1950s he helped lead the charge to draw admirers of feet and legs to a larger audience. A foot fetishist in the 1950s was still viewed as a creepy sexual deviant. Though the non-stop harassment of the authorities eventually pushed Batters out of the publishing world, he would continue his work photographing the feet pin-up models clad in thigh-high seamed stockings in various stages of nudity for decades. Sometime in the late 1980 German publisher Benedikt Taschen stumbled on Battles work in Leg Show magazine and would go on to put out three remarkable books containing the photographer’s work—From the Tip of the Toes to the Top of the Hose, Legs That Dance to Elmer’s Tune, and one dedicated to the foot enthusiast’s main muse, a model named Caruska, Elmer Batters - The Caruska Sittings. Batters referred to the mysterious Caruska (pictured above) as his “favorite model” and she was a huge hit with his foot-fetish fan base. According to Batters he found Caruska at a Hollywood Boulevard casting company called Pretty Girl International where the beautiful model was apparently having a hard time finding work as she was considered to be “unconventionally heavy” for the time.
Here’s Batters on Caruska’s many appealing attributes:
I think love or even sexual attraction comes from the sparkle in a girl’s eyes, the lift of her eyebrow, and the way her lips curl into that provocative smirk that hooks a man’s soul like a hapless mackerel. This is Caruscha’s strength. Her face seduces me even now–these 25 years later as it has seduced thousands of you. Go ahead and give in to her. Even back in the unliberated (years) when these photos were taken, Caruschka was a girl who loved to have men masturbate over her. Yeah, she was a tease but isn’t every woman worth a damn?
Though Batters passed away in June of 1997 at the age of 78 he left us with an expansive body of work such as the rather amusing departure from his super-sexy stocking photos for a magazine published in 1968 called Sneaker World of Elmer Batters, a cheeky publication that featured semi-nude leg models wearing sneakers and stockings. I’ve included a couple of images from Sneaker World as well as many examples of Batters’ controversial images from his heyday. That said, it should be clear that the images that follow are (despite the fact that it’s 2016 and most of these photographs are approximately 50-years-old) should be considered NSFW.
More after the jump…
