The Empty college

It took a long time before it actually happened, but eventually we had an appointment.
We were approached by Claudia, a student photography from Amsterdam.
For her final study assignent she wanted to depict something with the theme "Space". Because of het admiration of the work of Erwin Olaf, she had linked it to BDSM/bondage for this subject: "Space". The explanation regarding to bondage was the actual lack of space... or the contrast between the very limited space of a bound person and a large open space that person is placed in.

We're always game for that kind of challenges and so it came about that we went looking for a location to make it come true. In our city there is a university that at the moment has some rather old buildings in its posession that are abandoned. Some are being inhabited to prevent squatters to take over and live there illegally, but the people that live there are hardly ever there during the day.

The builings aren't suitable for the current classes anymore, but they're beautifully old and will not be torn down just like that. One of them caught our attention and I just contacted the person responsible with the very serious question if we could take pictures there for Claudia's final study assignment. Of course we didn't tell him that we were going to do a bondage shoot :)
We were very welcome, he said.

The building is an old faculty building with a number of offices, long wiiide hallways, a few large college rooms and beautiful staircases.
30's buildings are just perfect for this kind of occasions :)

Anyhow....the day came. We had arranged that we would pick up Claudia at the train station where she was waiting with all her gear. We drove right to the building where we met the caretaker.
We also met up with an Urban Explorer whom I know as a client from my rope business. He's from the same city as us. A wonderful opportunity for him also to explore this building.

The caretaker let us in and he showed us around. While he did that we were putting our eyes to good use and watched the beautiful locations in the place. We would never have enough time here!!!!
The caretaker told us during the tour that we were really going to be the last ones he did this for. He was getting so many requests to use this location that it getting impossible for him to do. A nice story is that he even refused that some scenes from the famous Dutch movie "Blackbook" from the director Paul Verhoeven would be shot there, because it was just to much of a effort. AND WE WERE ALLOWED IN !!! *hahaha*
He left us alone to do our things and we agreed that we would cal him about 3 hours later to come and let us out.
We found some great spots and I started to tie and Claudia was trying to find the best angles to photograph her.

The first location was one of the collegerooms. After that we went to the staircase and later an office room. Of course we did some shot in the beautiful long hallway. All in all a location where we would have liked to have wandered and shot photos for a few days. This was our only chance we took it with both hands.
Claudia was shooting lots of photos; I was tied and watching Debora and took care that none of the inhabitants accidentally came along. The Urban Explorere watched with us and did his own things in the building to shoot beautiful pics and thus we all had a very nice afternoon.
This exciting and relaxed at the same time we haven't experienced before. The place was just great and we hope that you'll see it back in the pictures. There are photos here of Claudia and myself
In the end Claudia changed the subject for her final study asignment and so she hasn't used any of the pictures for it. Still we would like to thank Claudia for this wonderful experience.

Marrow en Debora