What was the earliest X rated (explicit spread shots) photography?

[Pinkpapercut]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

Looking at the vintage photography threads, it seems that it was all "figure" shots-- eg what would be "R rated" in a movie today.

I remember seeing Hustler for the first time-- my first exposure to full spread erotica, though I'm sure that wasn't the first that it had been published.

What's the history here? Even today, genitalia are forbidden in Japanese porn -- how did standards for explicit porn evolve elsewhere?

Essentially this >

Originally Posted by damp-patch

Probably the day after photography was invented

I've read a handful of books and websites over my adult lifetime (40 years) that covered the topic of early vintage erotica and there appears to be very little information out there about the explicit stuff, be it spread-legged girls with open labia on show or whatever variety of explicit sex.

That said, such genitally explicit photo-porn was created very early I don't know the exact dates of the following photographs but you can guess from the clothes of the girls when they're wearing clothes.

This first selection is German or French, late 19th Century to very early 20th Century, what here in Britain we would call Late Victorian and Early Edwardian




The next are from the 1920s through to mid-1950s, US, French, perhaps German and British too:



So 'Spread Shots' were being produced 150 years ago at the very least, which is soon after the invention of photography, not only before Hustler, but well before Bettie Page and the Spider Pool.

I've never been able to find out much about how the very early stuff was produced and distributed, it's usually ascribed to struggling photographers or brothels extending into porn work and using local prostitutes or struggling actresses and dancers but I can think of two old novels where pornographers operating or selling from bookshops are part of the plot, Raymond Chandler's 'The Big Sleep' (1939) and Joseph Conrad's 'The Secret Agent' (1907 but set in 1886 London) so I guess those were well-known outlets for Porn in Europe and I'm aware that many 'Surgical Goods' shops in Britain were often fronts for Porn retailers; I can remember one still operating in a desultory way not far from the University district of Manchester (UK) in the mid 70s.

As I remember, outside of the big cities, pre-1960 porn in the USA was distributed illegally through the postal system.

In the last years of his life my Granddad, who had served in Egypt just before the First World War, said that porn - or as he put it "filthy postcards, showing the lot" - was available from street vendors, at least in Alexandria.

I'd be fascinated if anyone can post anything about the early production and distribution of explicit porn.

I have a personal theory as to why what you call 'full spread shots' were less common in the past. Many black & white photo processes were over-sensitive to the red part of the spectrum, which they captured as dark grey or black, internal photographic light sources were minimal, and the exposure speed of plates and films very slow.

You may have seen documentaries about early photography where the person being photographed had to be held in a neck brace so that they didn't move over the minutes needed to expose the photograph. Think also of the low resolution of most photographic processes until the start of the 1960s.

Imagine all those problems involving a girl in the discomfort of lying or sitting without moving at all, with her legs spread wide for a minute, five minutes or even more only for the film to register her love lips as invisible because being dark pink or red they're as dark as her bush.

Even with flash photography the other problems remained.

It's off-topic but if you look closely at early porn of couples having penetrative sex the man will often be deploying a carved phallus held at crotch height as if it's his erect cock; again, imagine trying to maintain a hard-on while keeping stock-still in an uncomfortable pose for minute after minute.

I think a major reason for the depiction of spread legs and open labia in the stronger 'under-the-counter' magazines of the 60s and then in magazines like 'Hustler' in the USA and the Sullivan and GSP publications in the UK, not to mention the hard-core coming out of Denmark etc, was that cheap good quality high-definition colour photography and cheap high quality four-colour magazine printing both became available at that time.

Of course the general 'sexual revolution' in Europe and North America was also a big factor in the 'Hustlerisation' of girlie porn.
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An aside on Bettie Page and spread shots - When I first became aware of Bettie in the late 80s what little information I could find insisted that she had never done 'explicit' work, not even open leg shots, the most she had done was show her bush, even in her early photo-club work.

Then photos appeared of her with her frontal cleft visible through her pubes, then as the Web took off spread legged poses with her open vulva visible.

Groups of these photographs had clearly been taken in the same room because the same furniture is visible but there are other spread shots of Bettie in different rooms and there are some explicit shots of her that appear to have been taken in a studio,

In several of those studio photographs Bettie is kneeling with her open bottom to the camera showing her anus. There are a couple of other shots of her spreading her bottom photographed in a different setting but one of the studio photographs has been posted by ponky in his post above.

Bettie once said she was unashamed of anything she had done. Given the hint by Paula Klaw/Kramer that she had photos of Bettie in her archive that had never been seen, the fact that supposedly non-existent 'spread' photos of Bettie have appeared over time and that Bettie was even prepared to pose for anally-explicit photos such as the one below, I suspect that whatever Bettie claimed, she posed at least for open shots at some of her photo-club shoots, not just the 'drunken' one she acknowledged, and may have done the same for the Klaws,

Originally Posted by ponky

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Pinkpapercut

So 'Spread Shots' were being produced 150 years ago at the very least, which is soon after the invention of photography, not only before Hustler, but well before Bettie Page and the Spider Pool.

I've never been able to find out much about how the very early stuff was produced and distributed,

In general they weren't able to publish them legally. My impression is that pretty much everything that shows genitals we're seeing before 1950 (maybe before 1970) was illegal. That's _still_ the case in Japan, btw . . . and they still run under late Victorian laws about obscenity, producing that characteristically weird Japanese dichotomy between really kinky stuff and modestly pixellated vaginas.

So we have a huge change in the US in the 1970s-- I don't think you can find anything earlier that [legally] shows genitalia, or sex.

BDSM is a curious case-- you could show spanking and bondage, in many cases where you could not show nudity. So in France and Germany, in particular, the flagellation novel is a legally permitted form, while the nude stuff is black market . . .

[scottx]

i'm pretty sure porn an the birth of photography go hand in hand. I've seen stuff from the salient film era, like 1910s 1920s