So what if my interests are neither prurient nor lofty?
From a psychological perspective, the series is a bit like Niko Tinbergen’s work on herring gulls. He showed that the yellow mark on the beak of the parent was the trigger to cause young gulls in the nest to open their mouths to be fed. So a pencil coloured bright yellow was an even more effective stimulus.
The pictures in the 1950s are relatively naive - they are “believable” pictures of naked women. But as time goes on it’s clear that the images are being manipulated, with various kinds of exaggeration that make them less realistic but more effective at creating a response. Then, it looks to me, it goes straight downhill; like Tinbergen’s pencil, the focus becomes a shaven pubic area so as to display the labia. This despite the fact that pubic hair is a sign of sexual maturity.
I’m not going to write @Mindysan33 her essay, certainly not with a bibliography, but it looks as if there has literally been a race to the bottom, with more subtle eroticism ending up as an Internet-fueled display of penises and labia (a bit like the Pompeii frescoes, in fact). There really isn’t anywhere to go from there. I don’t think we want society to come over all prudish again, especially because that facilitated so much abuse, but how do we back off from the present extremely objectivised representation of sex?
Surely a digitized archive of Playboy Centerfolds should give special credit to Lena Söderberg, of unexpected prominence in image processing test data fame?
It’s not entirely clear that we do(it’s far from news that some people who keep bumping the dose to chase their initial response to a drug they are developing a tolerance to…just don’t turn out well); but the more optimistic take is that at least some of the hyper-optimization of visual stimulus is a byproduct of the fact that visual stimulus is all you have to work with. Magazines don’t even have sound or motion; and no presently effective medium gets tactile, olfactory, etc. cues to work with; so they compensate by pulling out all the stops on the stimuli they can control. So long as it’s an arms race within the confines of very limited media, I imagine that you just keep turning it up to 11. If either the technology expands the number of flavors of stimulus you can recreate, or your audience is actually having more real sex with real humans, the incentive to lurid selective emphasis might be toned down.
(The analogy that comes to mind is silent movies, especially B/W ones: a lot of them, even the ones that have aged well enough to be considered worth pulling out of the archives outside of niche film studies contexts, are basically a lot of shots of actors in really, really, lurid makeup staring straight into the camera and producing gruesomely exaggerated facial expressions. When you don’t have color or sound, and your plot is dispensed on the occasional title card, that’s apparently how you get emotion across. Now that we have more options, even the most histrionic schlock doesn’t have actors doing that.)
Only the National Geographic is part of the same organisation as Fox News now so they’ll probably have full on christian fundamentalist prudery from now…
The style of ‘airbrushing’ certainly changed, and how they chose to ‘airbrush’ it - but none of these are untouched candid photography, by any stretch of the imagination.
Some might not know this: If you add slash+zip to an imgur link, you can download all (properly named) images conveniently archived on a ZIP file. Enjoy. http://imgur.com/a/Uxug4/zip
The book Seriously Funny by Gerald Nachmann starts from an interesting premise that the repression of the '50’s forced a breakthrough by giving people something to rebel against. It’s kind of a way of saying that even a steaming pile of shit can have a silver lining.
We’ve gone from unacceptable to show pubic hair, to acceptable to show pubic hair, to unacceptable to even have pubic hair.
Many modern folk would find the sight of these (70s) women displeasing just because they haven’t cut off a natural part of their body. Seems messed up.
I was born into a world where pubic hair was the norm on adults, and pubic baldness was for children.
Women’s armpit hair has never troubled my aesthetic sensibilities (but their grooming choices are none of my business anyway). Since my personal taste seems to be at issue, I’ll admit that heavy leg hair would probably be unattractive to me (but is again only the business of the leg’s owner) on women, but it’s hard to say since I see it so very rarely.
The available techniques of image “improving” in the 1950s and 1960s were pretty basic compared to what came later. They relied on retouching rather than airbrushing, and there was a long tradition of people who “colorised” black and white images and who were available to do this kind of work.
But, as with 19th century production line portraiture, it meant that images tended to be retouched close to a “norm” which the retoucher had found to work. It was a skilled, time consuming job done to a deadline and retouchers were not about to get too experimental.
During WW2 a cottage industry arose of photographers who would take nude photos of wives and girlfriends for them to give their SOs to take to war. These naturalistic photos would have set a line of expectation for what followed. Thus, the images may be almost completely repainted, but the poses, props and so on would still tend to relate to this earlier mode.
Umberto Eco dying has caused me to revisit his work, I’ve been thinking a fair bit about signs and signifiers recently.
Armpit hair was still very common in the 60s, leg hair much less so. Possibly as a result I find armpit hair quite erotic, as I suspect do a lot of my generation.
Does it seem weird to anyone that women with no body hair whatsoever has become the norm in these photos? That seems weirdly… pre-pubescent. I mean, I’m pretty gay, so I’m kind of looking at this as an outsider.
