Oh, the young women who roared through the ’20s! Flappers frolicked while Bernice bobbed her hair. A new book titled "Premiere Nudes" contains hundreds of photos of these girls, half-dressed and naked.
Nothing makes a woman seem more naked than standing au naturelle wearing an antique hairdo. Almost all of California photographer Albert Arthur Allen’s women have bobbed coiffures — short hair marked with art deco swirls. He was a refugee of a wealthy New England family, as well as the victim of a San Francisco motorcycle accident that left him a hunched-over gimp. That said, from 1915 to 1930, Allen compelled hundreds of California girls to drop their knickers and pose naked. He was not shooting dirty pictures. He believed sex appeal was "human appeal." He also believed "the true nude gives a version of beauty, both physical and spiritual — two great needs of humanity."
Allen was a seer who thought his photos would inspire a kind of paradoxical chaste lust and reveal the potential of all naked women to become icons. His first series of nudes was of girls posing along the Pacific Coast or among nearby timber. Then Allen put his nude beauties in bourgeois or fake Moorish interiors: a naked dame musing at her piano. Or in her bath. Or inside the confines of her harem tent. Allen’s inadvertent masterpiece is a choreographed extravaganza of a dozen dancing naked women, a vision that predates Busby Berkley by a good 10 years.
I suspect in the 1920s, Allen girls would have been considered slender enough. Not that I have any proof. Nude photography was almost always illegal in the 1920s, so there is not an abundance of photographic evidence. As it was, Allen bore the wrath of San Francisco bluenoses more than once during the ’20s and was hauled before a judge because of his photos.
Allen’s work was immediately different from that of other photographers of nudes at the time. For one thing, his work depicted the models’ pubic hair. Daile Kaplan, author of the foreword to Allen’s book, devotes many words to how radical photographing muff was in those Comstock days. Allen himself said he was a "trail finder." And like all trail finders he expected "a certain amount of criticism." He then compared his "humble" photographs to "those of the early martyrs of the Christian church." "We are in the same position, relatively," he said.
In 1923, this "easy rider" martyr ran his motorcycle into a streetcar, crumpling his right leg. "After numerous medical procedures, his right hip was fused, a condition that meant his left leg was permanently set in a sitting position," Kaplan writes. "Disabled for the rest of his life, Allen walked bent over or on crutches."
In 1924, Allen’s martyrdom continued. He was indicted for mailing obscene materials interstate. In 1925, Allen was indicted again for using American Express to send obscene material. This litigation would last for years. Compared to Parisian pornography, Allen’s work was obscene only by American hayseed standards. He tried whenever possible to choose models with "red-blooded American good looks." He invented the word "sexin" to describe his two classifications of womanhood — "virgin" and "mother." For Allen, a virgin was any woman who had not given birth.
In a way Allen saw his work as a great democratic project. "To see womankind entirely nude would place all women on equality," he wrote. "And it would be only their true mental and physical charm that would lift them from the ordinary." In 1925, Allen lifted women from the ordinary by putting them into groups and having them perform nude choreography and military drills. Read more at salon.com
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