Günter Blum was a German fine art photographer best known for his erotic depictions of nude women. Born on January 16, 1949 in Mannheim, Germany, he studied graphic design and spent the early part of his career creating magazine, book, and album covers. He took up photography in the late 1980s, embarking on a series of erotic photographs inspired by Fritz Lang’s seminal film Metropolis (1927), posing a female model alongside elaborate, large-scale sets resembling machinery. Blum’s work was initially inspired by the likes of Helmut Newton and Jan Saudek, but his photography become more focused on BDSM imagery over time, as evidenced by one of his most famous photos, Spiegal Spezial (Special Mirror), a cover for Der Speigal magazine which depicts buttocks wrapped in barbed wire and fishnets. His primary model and muse, Sylvie Neubauer, would later become his wife, though they were married less than a year before Blum succumbed to lung cancer on July 20, 1997. His work was the subject of a major retrospective in 2014 at Galerie Reygers in Munich.