This image was among the first we published as RopeMarks, in 1999. It was taken with an analogue camera and scanned to use on this site – a site that was a non-automated, what we call now a, blog. This was also the time where the information about bondage from Japan was hard to find, needed to be hunted and in effect made sure that as a Western student your only path was developing your own style.

This is a stark contrast where you now have a rope-get-together-event-festival-munch-whatever almost ever week somewhere on our blue globe; information is happily exchanged and accepted blindly as a truth and then copied, photographed and posted on as much social media as possible.

The “old rope-days” were hard, definitely not something to want back; but sometimes, just sometimes, I miss the hunt for that one pearl related to rope-bondage, a technique, a pose, a bit of information that will progress your growth and style where instead finding that pearl these days means “the world” has already copied it, took photo’s of it, spread it as their own, named it and changed it – all before I had my first morning coffee.

Bob
doing rope since 1984

 

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