The Folsom Street Fair is a yearly event that draws thousands of onlookers and participants alike to the San Francisco street each year. Made for fetish enthusiasts, the event offers musical acts, public play booths and a lot of leather.
Late last year, the fair offered something new.
Michael Topolovac and Ti Chang are in the business of pleasure. They are co-founders and also the CEO and designer, respectively, of Crave, purveyor of “elegant, sophisticated and thoughtfully designed” sex toys. For 2017, an idea to explore sexuality and self-expression in a new way quite literally fell at their doorstep.
Topolovac and Chang’s office is on Folsom Street, near where the fair takes place. The pair set up a portrait studio in their office and invited participants to take part in a project.
“We had no idea how it was going to go. We just put a little poster out,” Topolovac told HuffPost. “People were lined up the whole day.”
Participants were photographed as they presented during the fair. Then, about 50 of them were asked to come in for a follow-up shoot, wearing the clothing they would typically wear out on a regular day.
The resulting photos explore not only the depth of human sexuality but the beauty of self-expression.
“It’s less about the BDSM aspect per se or their orientation or identity,” Topolovac, who took the photos, said. “I think what we discovered, especially when we shot the second photographs, was that it’s about people’s shared humanity. There was a common thread of, ‘Hey, this is us. We’re complicated. We’re diverse. We’re expressive.’”