Criticism, arranged in four strands

Bound bodies were a standard subject in European art long before anyone called them erotic: the captive, Andromeda on her rock, Sebastian at his column, Prometheus on his crag. What the alibi of myth and martyrdom allowed painters to show.

One subject in European art puts a woman above a helpless man with a blade in her hand, and painters returned to it for five hundred years. What each version does with her expression, her clothes and her accomplice is the whole argument.

Two traditions of photographing power, and what each one can and cannot say. The studio arranges everything and admits it. The document arranges less and admits nothing. Neither is the honest one by default.

Kink on television runs on one advantage film does not have, which is duration, and against two pressures that push it toward comedy or ruin. Billions, Bonding and Obsession.

A band at the throat is the most efficient sign in the whole repertoire, and it has meant ownership, rank and chosen bond in turn. Five things to check in a picture before deciding which one you are looking at.

Kneeling is the one posture in the repertoire that means opposite things depending on a fact the picture may not show. Devotion, homage, surrender and defeat all use the same shape, and painters spent a thousand years working out how to tell them apart.

A working method for looking at images of dominance and submission: follow the light, find the higher plane, track the eyelines, test whether the bound figure has been given any authority, and ask what the frame asks of you.

BDSM documentaries keep arriving in the same defensive shape. Kink and tOuch Kink reach it from opposite incentives, and Beyond Vanilla, finished in 2001, never reaches it at all.