Drawing on a panorama of materials from 1930s France, Eroticism and Photography in 1930s French Magazines takes a new approach to studying a certain type of image from a certain time.
Previously untapped by historians, magazines such as Paris Magazine, Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux, and Scandale are inscribed in the context of the interwar years. They reflect that context through a bawdy style, an audacious and multifaceted aesthetic – from kitsch to modern – and permeability to reproducibility. With a focus on the photographs as components of the magazines’ layout, Alix Agret critically examines their interrelations with texts and graphics without neglecting the history surrounding them, which forms a backdrop to the analyses of this previously unstudied source material. The first study of its kind, this is a timely scholarly contribution to the field of the history of photographs.
This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of history of photography, French history, and twentieth-century art history.
Author(s): Alix Agret
Series: Routledge History of Photography
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 254
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Contextualising Paris Magazine
Paris Magazine’s Photographers
Victor Vidal, Diana Slip, and an Erotic Empire
International Echoes and Sources of Inspiration
The Modern Woman
Paris Magazine’s Writers
Paris Magazine’s Literature
Paris Magazine’s Politics
2 Reading Paris Magazine
1. Reading Paris Magazine as a Woman
A. A Site of Temptations
B. ‘La lectrice excitée éteint l’électricité’
2. Paris Magazine’s Bad Literature
A. A Woman ‘en pointillé’
B. Fantasies as Utopian Loci?
3. When Photography Encroaches on Literature and Vice Versa
3 Watching Paris Magazine
1. The Night and Cinema: Walking through the City
A. The Night Is Blue
B. Paris in the Dark: Staging the City
C. In the Darkroom: Images of the Underworld
2. Magazines, between Hyperimages and Montage
3. Cinema, from Screen to Page
A. Let’s Misbehave! Print Culture, Sex Appeal, and Hollywoodian Promotional Discourses
B. Screen Goddesses: Stardom and Photogeny
C. Longing for Cinema: Printed Stillness and Moving Images
4 Consuming Paris Magazine
1. End Matter: The Magazines’ Advertising System
2. On the Threshold of Pornography: Classified Ads and Illicit Sex
3. Undressing for the Camera: Women and Amateur Photography
5 The Magazines’ Colonial Unconscious
1. Mythologising and Eroticising the Other: The African Venus
2. Glamorising the Other: Black Is White
A. Josephine Baker: A ‘Parisian Savage’?
B. Wearing Blackness as Make-up
3. ‘Look, a Negro!’ Black Is Primitive
4. Orientalist Mise en Scène
A. From a Film Set to Amateur Photographs
B. Pseudo-ethnographic Photography and Kitsch
6 When Art Meets Erotic Magazines
1. Man Ray, the Surrealists, and Exoticism
2. Paris Magazine as Bad Art and/or Ready-made
A. In Praise of Duplication: Picabia’s 1940s Paintings
B. Cutting . . . : Georges Hugnet
C. . . . Pin-ups . . . : Karel Teige
D. . . . Into Pieces: Marcel Mariën
Epilogue
Appendix
Selective Bibliography
Index
