“It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1982 when I started working on porn movies, we shot real 35mm film on big movie cameras. Home video cassette players had barely been invented. There were no DVD’s, no home computers, no Internet. People went out to downtown movie theaters and watched sex movies on the silver screen.” American Ecstasy is the photographic memoir of Barbara Nitke who over 12 years shot publicity stills during the golden age of porn. “My images reveal the contradictions inherent in the business – great beauty, tinged with sadness, punctuated by surreal silliness.” Nitke is currently raising funds to publish a book of “….seventy color plates, a selection of my written stories of life on the movie sets, and short excerpts from tape recorded interviews [she] conducted with the porn stars at the time.” There are currently 11 days left to complete funding for the publishing of American Ecstasy.
