Ken Marcus (USA)

Ken Marcus is an American photographer, known for his glamour photography with Penthouse and Playboy magazines. In 1971 Ken became the first American photographer for Penthouse magazine. His early pictorials involved couples and models photographed through heavy, soft focus diffusion. This technique, while popular during the early part of the 20th century, had not been used in publication since the early 1920s. Ken crafted his own homemade diffusion filters because, at that time, there were none available on the commercial market. In 1974, Ken left Penthouse to become the West Coast Contributing Photographer at Playboy magazine. For 11 years Ken’s work was featured regularly in Playboy’s 15 international editions, and for eight of those years Ken exclusively photographed the Playboy Calendar. For almost 25 years, Ken was a regularly featured speaker at national photo conventions and expos. His self-titled website, KenMarcus.com, originally opened as a portfolio website in the mid-1990s. Soon thereafter, he opened up his members section, featuring a variety of images he had taken over the years. In addition to more conventional erotic images, Ken’s site featured bondage and BDSM images from his book “California Club”, published in 1996 in Japan. Eventually, his website focused on BDSM and fetish imagery, a focus that continues to this day.