These photos stretch extreme wedgies to their limits

Benjamin Fredrickson is aware that he’s hoisted his legacy as a portrait photographer by the seat of its underwear and given it a ball-crushing wedgie. “If nobody pays attention to my work after this, that’s fine,” he says. “It’s fun, it’s sexy, it connects people. If it strikes a chord with anyone, even a conversation about whether or not you hate wedgies, that’s pretty special.”

For the past four years, the Brooklyn-based photographer has been snapping anyone willing to floss their cheeks in the name of art, as part of his ongoing Wedgies series. This summer Baron Books is publishing a compilation of Fredrickson’s most eye-watering wedgies – from underwear dangling from a pull-up bar to boxers harnessed off the ground to pants trapped in door jambs. It’s a ballsy, deeply hypnotic book.

Fredrickson began Wedgies shortly before the pandemic but rather than hindering him, lockdown gave him the chance to work with international asses. “It posed a really interesting roadblock and a new way to think creatively around how to do it,” he explains. “I did remote wedgies on Zoom. People would put their phones or their laptops in interesting places and it’d be really collaborative. I photographed somebody on their rooftop in Mexico City and somebody in the woods of Finland. It was really fun because I got to connect with people globally.”

“I did remote wedgies on Zoom. People would put their phones or their laptops in interesting places and it’d be really collaborative” – Benjamin Fredrickson

COVID did indeed suck, but it was fascinating the way artists persevered during the initial lockdown. “You have this screen between you but there is that intimacy and there’s something to be said about that,” he says. “I ended up doing a remote wedgie shoot with Reno Gold for Interview’s March 2021 issue and by then I could shoot remotely from my phone to their phone and shoot raw files, and make it fit to print for a magazine.” In every image, Fredrickson’s subjects are entirely anonymous, save for Gold, an OnlyFans creator. “It’s a magazine editorial so it’s like, yeah, you’ve got to see Reno Gold’s face.” Was he strict about obscuring faces? “Yeah. It’s part of making it about the wedgie, where the body is sort of a vessel for that and the wedgie is the work.”

Fredrickson found that the anonymity encouraged a lot more willing participants. “I had a lot of people reaching out who wanted to explore their fetish side or explore their sexuality and have a way to express that without fear of being outed,” he says. “It can just be a body and there’s something really sexy about that. It’s easier for people to step into the fantasy when it’s not about a specific person and that’s what makes the work successful – it could be anybody.” 

Given that Fredrickson has included a lot of atomic wedgies – his models pushing their cracks to the limit – there’s a masochistic element to the series. He’s keen to clarify that, despite how it looked, no one was ever in any physical pain. “Some people are really into that bullying element to it and there’s a lot of wedgie porn that’s more focused on role-playing but my approach is less masochistic,” he says. “It’s all in the tricks of photography in creating these extreme images. I hope I’m not killing the fantasy by saying this but it’s constructing it to look like that – I don’t actually want to hurt anyone.” The photo series was so convincing that Fredrickson’s landlord saw one image of someone suspended from plumbing in his basement and freaked out because he thought Fredrickson had damaged the pipes. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s an illusion!’ It’s all about creating the fantasy without harming people.”

Fredrickson’s entry into the world of wedgies was entirely accidental. He had just finished a project using a cumbersome 8x10 camera and he wanted his next work to be less exhausting. “I knew I wanted to work with bodies and have it be less like traditional portraits like I’d been doing for many years,” he says. “I wanted it to be more figurative and was thinking about how to work with bodies. The first thing that came to mind was Martha Graham and the images of her in stretchy dresses and how the body can contort.” Fredrickson was experimenting with leotards and underwear in his studio when the person he was working with gave themself a spontaneous wedgie. “I was laying on the ground getting the perspective and I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is so fucking hot.’ There was something about this that I knew I needed to explore more.” 

He found there was a thriving online wedgie community. “I’m part of the community now but it was so cool how supportive people were, giving me intel in terms of what underwear is best for what,” he says. The online interest was also off the charts; after starting Wedgies, Fredrickson gained 17,000 followers on Instagram (his account was then shut down and he had to restart). “The only time I wasn’t able to work with people [who wanted to work with me] was when I just didn’t have enough time because there were so many requests,” he says. Wedgies is Fredrickson’s most popular project to date and, despite its unorthodoxy, he couldn’t be happier with its success. “I have to laugh because I’ve been making pictures for, like, 20 years,” he says. “For this to be my legacy? I’m OK with that.”

Benjamin Fredrickson’s Wedgies is published by Baron Books and is available to pre-order here now.