In light of the recent NY Times Magazine article on Brock Enright and  Videogames Adventure Services, I thought I would revisit the story I shot about them in the summer of 2002 when I was an intern at Magnum Photos in New York. I met Brock and the other members [...]]]>

In light of the recent NY Times Magazine article on Brock Enright and  Videogames Adventure Services, I thought I would revisit the story I shot about them in the summer of 2002 when I was an intern at Magnum Photos in New York. I met Brock and the other members of the group through a mutual friend and spent a couple of months photographing the day to activities of the group, as well as on kidnapping that they did of a Brooklyn based graphic designer. It took weeks to convince them to let me ride along and photograph, and I did a bit of surveillance work for them as they planned the pick up of the client. One could never tell what was real or what was part of the game when talking to Brock, and I think this was part of the point. As a young, idealistic photographer, it was hard at times to know what to do when asked to participate in the outer fringes of the planning process, would I be inserting myself into the process thus violating the primary rule of documentary photography? In the end, it was fun so I did, I stand my that decision as I believe it was the only way to get access to the meat of the story.

The only alarming part of the story, other than watching someone be voluntarily beaten and put under duress, was when we got followed by an NYPD patrol car right after the client had been grabbed in his hallway , tied up, and shoved in a large duffel bag. Think about this way, it is the summer after 9/11, we are 6 or so men in a white U-Haul van with a man in a duffel bag and most of the members are wearing either pantyhose over their faces, or in my case, a scarf. The kidnapping was in the legal grey area that S&M houses fall into, legal is you do not get caught,  so if we got pulled, we would have gone to the precinct house absolutely, and to jail maybe. Good times.

It seems that the organization has gone far beyond the kidnapping and torture aspects of the “stories” they did before and now offer a much wider range of simulated life experiences as pieces of art, one of a kind, never to be seen again. I wish them the best, and if you have thousands of dollars laying around, and a hankering for something like this, find them here

If you want to see my edit go here

Many more in the archive

still looking for a home for this story, so get in touch if you are interested

Kidnappers read, too.