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PARTISAN REVIEW
spent his days in Storyville, a district in New Orleans where pros–
titution at that time was legal. The photographs are enormously
evocative, individualized, full of the pathos of times past, of mortality,
and they even evoke the Virgil ian emotion of celebrating the deeds
of times long gone. The cover photograph depicts one of the most
notable and desired of Storyville's prostitutes, who was, incidentally ,
the subject of the movie
Pretty Baby
starring Brooke Shields.
(5) A collection of photographs entitled
100 Years of Erotica,
edited by Paul Aratow and published in 1981, covers the years
1845-1945. As might be expected, they vary widely in quality; but
there is a sequence of photographs taken in 1910 in Paris depicting a
young couple in eight different sexual postures. The young woman
wears a headband to keep her hair from flying around, which it un–
doubtedly would have done otherwise. The photographs are in–
teresting and moving, and again we have an additional aesthetic ele–
ment introduced by the passage of time.
If
that young man and
woman are still alive, they would be in their nineties. But, given the
apparent age of the young man in 1910, it is much more likely that
he was mixed with the mud of Verdun or some such place. One is
glad that they evidently enjoyed themselves while they could .
(6) More modest in artistic ambition, but by no means con–
temptible, are the drawings by Charles Raymond and Christopher
Foss in the contemporary best-selling sex manual by Alex Comfort,
MoreJoy of Sex.
Though these drawings, both pastels and black and
whites, are intended to be instructional within the intention of the
book, they also have considerable delicacy and flair.
(7) Finally, I have before me the March 1979 issue of
Playboy ,
with a characteristic centerfold depicting one Denise McConnell.
She is without doubt a beautiful human being, and the photography
is technically accomplished, though the message of the props is ob–
vious mass-audience: Miss McConnell, mostly nude, has her right
hand on the latch of a door, presumably to the bedroom. I am cer–
tainly not sorry that this photograph exists, and, indeed, the world
would be the poorer place if Miss McConnell were not in it.
We could, of course, descend to
Penthouse, Hustler, Playmate,
Screw
and even to still lower levels, and we could easily specify the
nature of their artistic inferiority to the works we have been discuss–
ing above. But the point is that we would be dealing with
bad art
comparable to that described by Steven Marcus.
There is always the matter that a special anxiety appears to sur–
round this issue. After all, we are not so exercised morally and
