This photo of Rosario Dawson in a dominatrix getup has been circulating recently in some of my social media feeds. It’s a very nice photo, but that “faux dominatrix doing nothing” schtick has been done — so much so that Spy magazine lampooned it with a photoshopped Hillary Clinton in shiny latex all the way back in the early ’90s.

But I have a problem, and its name is Provenance. It’s very difficult for me to just drop a pretty picture and go “Yo, this pic is fun, I don’t know anything about it, k-thanks-bye.” Dumbass me, I always gotta Google.

Suddenly, the “every pretty celeb has done one” dominatrix photo gets a lot darker and more fascinating. When we look outside the narrow crop everybody is circulating, we see heavy vinyl curtains, a morgue table, some human feet, and a collection of evil-looking electrical devices, complete with cables and clamps. We’ve gone from “posing in the gear” to “some sort of interesting story has been interrupted in progress”:

The natural next step for me is to look for the source photoshoot and see if there are more pictures that tell even more of the interesting story. The photo is sourced to a shoot by 1990s fashon-photography darling Dah Len that appeared in the premier May 2002 issue of Complex magazine. Complex was a stylish hip-hop/fashion/culture mag that enjoyed a 15 year run (before the internet ate print mags) and still exists in the form of a large and flourishing youth-culture media company. Although the accompanying cover story from the magazine got published in 2012 on a now-crumbling Complex Media website that Archive.org captured in the Wayback machine, neither the Complex people nor the Archive have any imagery to show us. Instead I must work from various dodgy collections of “celebrity photos” on malware-shoving picture sites, and these are not reliably comprehensive. Nonetheless, my best synthesis of the available information is that this particular gritty dungeon scene probably appeared in just the one magazine photo.

However, there were other photos. My favorites have Rosario in what could be a schoolteacher outfit, vamping on a school desk while an anonymous man checks his weight on a scale, in the background. He, or someone, has been writing lines (“I will not…” at least fifteen times) on the chalkboard. Is Rosario a stern physical education teacher? That would not explain the accoutrements of geography instruction in the office. Why is the man being weighed? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’m pretty sure Rosario doesn’t plan to let weigh-in man out of her office without playing with him first:

A version of that latter photo, it turns out, also graced the cover of the magazine:

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