Erotic Photography: The rise of ‘Men’s Magazines’ in the 1960s
These days, nudity is so commonplace in our culture that you can barely log onto your favourite magazine website without being confronted by a nipple. However, before the rise of erotic photography, there was once a time when it was salacious to the extent of being criminalised. The story of its rise from the doldrums of the shrouded demimonde to the surface of everyday society is heavily entwined with civilisation itself and says a lot about our fascination with the topic.
Unsurprisingly, erotic depictions did not merely begin with the camera. There are even Roman monetary coins displaying coitus. However, perhaps equally unsurprisingly, it didn’t pretty much immediately after the camera was invented. It was being pointed at people in the nuddy. When Louis Daguerre presented the world with the first high-quality camera, with images that didn’t fade, in 1839, he opened the world up to a new age of liberation.
In the modern world, however, it is the 1960s that we view as the dawn of daring counterculture, and it is this period that Dian Hanson focuses on with Vol 4 of her Taschen series, The History of Men’s Magazines. It wasn’t so much that eroticism emerged in this era; it’s just that it started to weave its way into the acceptable mainstream. ‘Under the Counter’ became more of a coy term than a real taboo.
Hanson says that Milton Luros was at the heart of this. “[In 1958] he left his New York job designing and illustrating detective pulp magazines for North Hollywood, California. A year later, with a loan from an underworld figure, he founded a publishing empire that revolutionised men’s magazines in the 1960s.”
She continues: “His so-called ‘California slicks’ borrowed bad-girl themes from pre-Playboy burlesque titles, featuring big hair, heavy make-up, cigarettes, and cocktails, but in west coast mid-century settings with better photography, paper, and printing. With no redeeming articles, they were too strong for newsstands but outsold Playboy in tobacco shops and specialty bookstores.”
This ‘Under the Counter’ age went global. With erotic photography now a fad, it helped to break down the notions of perversion and pornography was almost seen as part of a healthy norm. Thanks to a censorship switch-up in Scandinavia, the liberation began to be legislated, and the rest is history.
The daring snaps below mark the moment that erotic photography in the Men’s Magazine sense really took hold. Now, stars like Bettie Page were pushing boundaries, combining sex appeal, charm, and dignified individualism. As her official biography states: “Without imagining the consequences on any conscious level, Bettie found that her provocative cheesecake photographs during the period of 1950 through 1957 violated all manner of sexual taboos and finally invoked a United States Senate Committee investigation.”
The 1960s picked up where she left off and then some. Below, you can see some of the magazine shots that feature in the Taschen publication Dian Hanson’s: The History of Men’s Magazines Vol 4, 1960s Under The Counter.
You can find out more and pick up a copy of your own by clicking here.
The History of Men’s Magazines:
