Theo Ehret spent a good twenty years, beginning in the 1960s, as a professional photographer in Los Angeles. He started out photographing modern buildings and homes around LA, but by the early 1970s was better known for his photographs of the local wrestling scene and, eventually, for pioneering the strange, soft-core genre of bikini-clad female Apartment Wrestling in his Echo Park studio.

“I made a pin-up board with my pro wrestling photos and had them imitate the moves. They didn’t know what to do, and I’m not an expert either. I picked out some wrestling photos and things started to develop from there.”

Artists Cameron Jamie and Mike Kelley edited a book of Ehret’s apartment wrestling photographs, Exquisite Mayhem: The Spectacular and Erotic World of Wrestling, published by Taschen in 2001. The PDF linked below is an interview between Jamie and Ehret, in which Ehret discusses how he got into the genre. Asked by Jamie if he finds the work to be sexy, Ehret answers: “No. I don’t think it’s sexy at all. It’s posed and make-believe, that’s what it is….I was completely impartial to it. It was a job, that was it.”