Susan Meiselas Photographer

I came off 18th Street, went up the elevator and entered. It was like a film set or backstage at a theatre. I was stunned by the sense of performance and the level at which the interiors had been constructed, how the walls were painted, and how each room had its own identity — the Versailles room, the medical room, the dungeon. I was fascinated by the ways in which the mistresses chose their clients and the clients chose their mistresses. - S.M.

Over many years I had been looking at enforced violence and the corresponding trauma. At Pandora’s Box I was witnessing the individual’s choice to participate in a violent act. It represented play in a controlled setting where the man could say, ’Mercy mistress’, and it stopped. This was the very opposite of what happens in interrogation cells. I have seen those spaces. These pictures were ten years before Abu Ghraib. - S.M.

Despite the sense of being on the edge, Pandora’s Box was still a safe confined space and I knew the boundaries. The underground slave culture is amorphous and terrifyingly real. Its current could drag you under. There is a subtle process here: you allow yourself to give in and then you have to pull out. - S.M.

Nick Broomfield had once wanted to make a film about Carnival Strippers, but when I met him in the eighties there was really nothing left to film. He was commissioned by HBO in the mid-nineties to make a film on S&M and had been in Japan and England. When he found Pandora’s Box, an S&M club on 18th Street in New York, he said it was like Carnival Strippers for a new decade. - S.M.

Pandora was the first mortal woman, created by Zeus as punishment for mankind. All the great gods gave her gifts. Athena breathed life into her and dressed her in elegant clothing, while Aphrodite covered her in jewels. Into Pandora’s mind, Zeus put insatiable curiosity, and then gave her a sealed box that he forbid her to open.

She was offered in marriage to Epimetheus, who had been warned never to accept a gift from Zeus. But dazzled by her beauty, he could not resist, and thus she came to live among mortals.

Pandora was not perfectly happy, for she was consumed by curiosity about what was inside the box. One day, she opened the lid, and out flew all the miseries, sufferings, and evils that still plague humanity to this day. In horror, Pandora quickly closed the box. All that remained inside was Hope.

- Introduction to Pandora's Box book, 2001

Pandora’s Box, Magnum Editions/Trebruk, 2001

In 2018, i went back to a new location for Pandora’s Box to do a fashion shoot for GARAGE Magazine. Their idea was to look at the influence of the BDSM community on high fashion. We hired the dominatrix to wear fetish clothing from the most elite designers as they performed their work.