Photographer Barbara Nitke began her career working in pornography in the early 80s — consider Boogie Nights, only without prosthetic genitalia and cherry red Corvettes. Nitke at the time was hired as a set photographer and saw the entire industry through a lens and perspective that very few were privy to. Besides shooting many of the proto-porn stars of the era — Ron Jeremy, Vanessa del Rio, Nina Hartley, Sharon Mitchell, Sharon Kane, Siobhan Hunter, Jeanna Fine, Damian Cashmere, Tasha Voux and more — in action, Nitke used her time on set to capture many more candid moments, and times of reflection… if that’s possible in a world of sweaty orgies and copious nudity. As Nitke writes: “It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1982 when I started working on porn movies, we shot real 35mm film on big movie cameras. Home video cassette players had barely been invented. There were no DVD’s, no home computers, no Internet. People went out to downtown movie theaters and watched sex movies on the silver screen. Our shoots lasted anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, with a crew of at least twenty people. We all put a lot of care into the script, the acting, the lighting, sound, editing – all the aspects of real movie-making. It was the Golden Age of Porn, and I was thrilled to be a part of it.” Can you even begin to imagine a time that you had to get in your car and drive (or jump in a subway) to a place to pay money to watch porn with a room full of strangers? Instead of, you know, doing it while in your socks as a desperate anodyne to quell the raging hungover from your previous night’s exploits. That doesn’t just seem like a different time, it seems like a completely different universe. Now Nitke has launched a Kickstart campaign to try to get her book of photography from the era printed. Thanks to the graphic nature of American Ecstasy‘s subject, however, Nitke has had an especially hard time finding a publisher for it. Check out the video below, and if you like what you see maybe throw a couple bucks her way…