This, of course, meant that I had to buy it, and in due course I did manage to bribe an older schoolfellow to get the copy I had seen. OK, I was disappointed; it was not about photography. But it was full, from cover to cover, with no written words - just one superbly printed picture each paperback size page, all of different girls. You could spot maybe one model re-appearing two or three times, and the credits extended just to the model's name or stage name. Only a few pages were in color, the rest were all monochrome, and every picture was fully retouched - while censorship was falling down all round us (little though I knew then) it remained in these small 'under-the-counter' books.
By today's standards they would be considered pointless and harmless. The pictures flattered, possibly even worshipped, the female form; whatever exploitation was involved, if there was any, might have existed behind the scenes in the shady world of mid-sixties London Soho, with Chrstine Keeler, the Kray Twins and all. It certainly never showed in Harrison Marks's camerawork.
He was a star in his own right, despite the advent of Bailey, and Blow-Up!, and the end of his empire of publications, movies and exhibition gallery - wiped out by the tawdry world of porn videos, men's magazines full of crappy graphic descriptions and stories for the mentally incapacitated, and full frontal television. Marks was an ex-Music Hall comedian who put his skill in entertaining people and knowledge of make-up and lighting to good use; he was said to be able to photograph anyone from a schoolgirl to a duchess in the nude without embarassment, and make the picture sexy without revealing anything below the belt or asking for a tawdry pose or expression.
I only ever owned one Harrison Marks Kamera issue, but it put me wrong for life. First, it made we want to be a photographer, and then it gave me the means to learn - I financed my first films and developers by making copy negatives of the pages and blowing them up in the school darkroom to sell to my friends. When I couldn't afford big enough paper, I traced the nudes under the enlarger as pencil drawings.
Second, because I went to one of those wonderful all-male English public schools which ejected me at the age of 15 after banning me from the darkroom (not for the above, which they never know about, but for over-enthusiasm about an unsuitable pastime and career), I got very fixated on extremely beautiful, perfect-looking girls with exceptional figures. So when I did get into the real world, I just went straight for the only girl in the 2,000-pupil state school I was sent to who looked as if she had walked off the page of Kamera, fell in love with her on sight, and married her four years later. She still looks just the same, turned out to have the brains as well as the looks, and I guess she still regrets saying yes to me instead of the captain of the school rugby team...
So, Harrison Marks, I owe you one there; that must have been near the end of the road for those little dirty magazines which really weren't dirty at all. I read an interview about Marks in the late 1970s which didn't really say what he was doing. You never, ever see his pictures anywhere and very few men (presumably aged 40 or over) would openly say 'Yes, I remember that'. All of which is more the pity, as one day his original prints - especially those with airbrushed-out pudenda - will be collectors' items, and at some stage he'll be the subject of a book, or an exhibition, making the point that he was one Britain's most successful photographic craftsmen of that era and that genre.
My apologies to Nostalgia Publications for inserting this small editorial. Not many Web readers, internationally, will know anything about this stuff or what it was. In an uncensored age where it is possible for a publication to degrade the author, the subject, the publisher, the vendor and the reader simultaneously it must be hard to imagine how illicit this material was even in the Swinging London of the mid-60s.
As a final postscript on censorship - yes, I have read the postings and visited some of the sites - I have to comment that many writers and photographers today will live to regret not the freedom they enjoy, but the commercial demands made on them because of that freedom. You can read Byron, Shelley, Swinburne or Browning in almost any culture or to children despite that fact that all were capable of writing pornography, bawdry or plain Anglo-Saxon 'rugger songs' in their spare time for the amusement of comrades; their publishers never asked them to include a verse of it here or a chapter of it there because 'the reader expects it'. The future will shit itself laughing at the shabby attempts of otherwise fine writers like Clive Barker to shift into describe-the-hero's-dick mode without utterly destroying pace and style, and will simply dismiss lesser animals like our own Jeffrey Archer and Melvin Bragg from the pantheon.
Photographers may not suffer the same fate - images can express great crudity with beguiling elegance, as Mapplethorpe proved. Generally, though, publications which in their day were only likely to get inseminated are unlikely at a future time to get disseminated.
C'est tout!
- David Kilpatrick