Bio

Barbara Nitke (b. 1950, Lynchburg, VA) is a photographer living in Harlem, New York.

She is best known for her humanistic, often sexually explicit, exploration of intimate relationships. In 1982, she discovered her vocation while working as the still photographer on the set of an adult movie, Nasty Girls. She spent the next decade working on New York porn sets, creating her American Ecstasy body of documentary photography. That initial work led her into many other sexual worlds over the following decades.

She studied business, literature and writing at Baruch College, and photography at the International Center for Photography and School of Visual Arts.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Storage APT, New York; the Hartnett Gallery at University of Rochester; One Eyed Jacks Gallery, Brighton, England; and Barristers, New Orleans. She is included in the permanent collections of the Kinsey Institute, the Finnish Museum of Photography, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and others. Her images have been the subject of articles in many venues, including Office Magazine, Forbes, Dazed, Slate, Vice, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times.

Her monograph, Kiss of Fire, was published in 2003 with an introduction by A.D. Coleman. In 2012 her second monograph, American Ecstasy, was published with an introduction by Arthur C. Danto.

She has worked as a still photographer on numerous movies and television shows shot in New York, and has served on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts since 1992.

In 2001 she filed a lawsuit, Nitke vs. Ashcroft, against the Communications Decency Act which inhibited free speech on the internet. In 2010 she joined the Free Speech Coalition in their lawsuit against excessive record keeping regulations aimed at the porn industry, which also limited the free speech of all artists on the internet.

In response to Project 2025, she has vowed to become a part of the resistance against political moves by the religious right to control our speech and our bodies.