Whither Harmony Concepts?

Like a lot of kinksters my age, one of the first "gateways" I had to the world of "bondage and discipline" was the work of Harmony Concepts. Even if my tastes in kink didn't run to the more subdued to start with, I probably would have latched onto Harmony's work simply because of its high artistry -- both from their professional producers and the amateurs whose work they distributed -- and how it so closely mimicked the kind of "tie-up games" I loved to play when I was younger.

Other studios did more explicit work, which was good in its own right, but even in an age before fucking machines and horror movie-like backdrops and all that stuff, Harmony's work tended to be much less "hardcore" than their contemporaries. Apart from special video lines, which were often advertised separately from their monthly mailers, their work contained no S&M (except for the kind of "spanking" that was so light that it'd be generous to call it "love taps"), hardly any explicit sexuality (save a few videos near the end that had magic wands) and usually only allowed nudity above the waist. Their "Harmony Philosophy" pervaded everything that they did, and for those of us who were (and still are) fans of love bondage, their work remains a kind of holy grail of the pre-digital age of kink erotica.

As more producers and models started setting up their own websites in the 1990s and 2000s, though, and as digital photography enabled amateurs to set up their own websites and make money that way, Harmony stopped being the kind of destination studio that it used to be. Especially as grittier, more sexually-explicit work became the norm in kink erotica, Harmony began to be seen as almost an anachronism, a quaint relic of the old days of fetish photography and videography along the lines of Irving Klaw's work. It didn't help that love bondage began to be seen as "not real" kink by many people who claimed that you weren't "really" kinky unless you engaged in X, Y and Z forms of "extreme" kink. (I abhor that kind of thinking.)

Although Harmony's old work is still available through their website, and other studios like FM Concepts produce stuff that's closer to Harmony's work than most of the other major studios these days, there really isn't the kind of one-stop-shop for a wide variety of current love bondage erotica that Harmony Concepts used to provide. Pretty much every major studio does a fair deal of explicit sexuality and hardcore S&M, probably because that's what sells the best these days. I'd like to think that there's still enough demand for love bondage that another studio can pick up where Harmony Concepts left off, but maybe the best we can hope for is the scattering of amateur love bondage producers that are still out there, but aren't as easy to find as the major studios.