Photographer Irving Klaw ran a mail-order business selling bondage photographs from the 1940s to the 1960s. He was one of the first fetish photographers, and his model Bettie Page became the first famous bondage model.

The "Kefauver Hearings" of the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States marked the beginning of the end of Irving Klaw's mail-order photography business.