Irving Klaw

Irving Klaw (November 9, 1910 - September 3, 1966) was an American photographer and filmmaker.

Klaw is best known for operating a mail-order business selling photographs and film of attractive women (sometimes in bondage) from the 1940s to the 1960s. He was one of the first fetish photographers, and one of his models, Bettie Page, became the first famous bondage model.

Klaw was born Isadore Klaw in Brooklyn, New York. into a Jewish family. His business, which eventually became Movie Star News, began in 1935 when he and his sister Paula opened a struggling used bookstore at 209 E. 14th St. in Manhattan.

After he discovered teenagers were frequently tearing out photos from his movie magazines, around 1939 he started selling movie star stills and lobby photo cards. Customers could order by item number from catalogs of sample photos. These sold so well that he stopped selling books and moved the store from the basement to the street-level storefront and renamed it Irving Klaw Pin Ups.

Business thrived, and the self-named "Pin-Up King" moved to 212 E. 14th St. and took on the name Movie Star News. Klaw also had a brisk international mail-order business selling cheesecake photos of movie stars.

By the late 1940s he received frequent requests for "damsel-in-distress" photos of actresses being bound and gagged, spanked and flogged. Because of the difficulty of finding enough stills to meet this growing demand, Klaw decided to produce his own photos.

He and Paula, who actually posed and took most of the photos in a studio upstairs above the store, started selling bondage and fetish photos using burlesque dancers like Baby Lake, Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr as models. Klaw always went to great pains to make sure his photographs contained no sex acts or nudity, which would have made the material pornographic and hence illegal to sell via mail.

Through his production company Nutrix Co., Klaw also published and distributed illustrated adventure/bondage serials by fetish artists Eric Stanton, Gene Bilbrew, Adolfo Ruiz and others.

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