Sylvia Hand

[hypercat77]

Originally Posted by John Hand

Yes I am John Hand and I am still very much alive. Sylvia is too but we are no longer married. The photos shown here by Edmund Leja/Ed Lea were taken at his house on Mulholland drive just west of Laurel Canyon. I also took photos in the same area including a house just down the road owned by a famous movie star.

Hello John !!! Im 60, and from the late 70s thru the 90s i was living close to Hollywood, collecting vintage movie and related zines and books during the late 70s thru the 90s and remember (even from the early 60s) seeing many published nudist photos (probably many by you) of Sylvia and noticing not only how strikingly beautiful she was but also how remarkably fit and athletic she was in those 60s pics, much more so than any other women featured in the nudist zines from that era....

Please tell us some things from your view about that long lost time ago, before those mag publishers turned toward a desperate attempt to compete with the then-oncoming 70s-90s flood of extreme porn labeled as promoting nudism....somewhere i read that the "golden age" of the genuine nudist zines was around 1960-75....or maybe it was just ten years, 1960-69 (?)....not sure, but having collected cover images of 600+ nudist titles from the 60s alone, that period was possibly where it peaked.

How are you ?, and how is Sylvia ?....how did you meet her ?, and when was the split-up ? (if youd rather not say, i will respect that)....does she too welcome and relpy to admirers /collectors about that time ? I hope you both are still proud of being two of the brave early pioneers of a very important movement of personal freedom and moral enlightenment at a time of great ignorance and persecution. And a lot of the photography of the women in those 60s zines is just amazing ! Decades later, im still wondering what has become of the thousands of un-published pics by you and Edmund Leja, Michael Leonard, Kieth and Iris Bancroft, Gary Sol, Ed Lange and many others. Nudist pioneer /beauty Diane Webber, as we all know, is now gone, yet oddly, ive never seen a pic of Diane and Sylvia together (???)....did they ever meet ?....were they rivals, or friends ?....

In closing, having years ago read from Dian Hanson's "Naked as a Jaybird" (2003), i hope someone (preferably you, with a dedicated group) who actually lived and photographed that movement puts out a hefty pictorial retrospective on it not too long from now, and hopefully, featuring many of those unpublished pics (and maybe also a 10-pound pictorial on Sylvia ?)!!!....Hope to read more from you soon !