Laura Mirsky put together a fine survey of, ahem, “art” photography for Benedikt Taschen that resulted in Forbidden Erotica: the Rotenberg Collection (Koln, Germany: Taschen Books, 2000). Her brilliant Foreword highlighted the place of “the nude” in the history of photography. It seems to have been virtually parallel, simultaneous. Credit for the world’s first Selfie goes to Mr. Robert Cornelius, who snapped a self-portrait in October of 1839. He was then a 30-year-old Philadelphian. He parked himself in front of his family’s gas-lighting business front and took a long-exposure daguerreotype. It is roundly considered to be the world’s first photographic portrait, in this case, a Selfie. His makeshift camera lens had been fashioned from used opera glass. Prior thereto, he’d placed a carefully prepared metal plate inside his camera. He had to stand still for upwards of 15 minutes. His resulting visage is a bit brooding (or rakish). Stiff collar turned up, hair in Dylanesque disarray, glance a bit sideward, he looks interested but maybe a bit unsure. This first Selfie shows Mr. Cornelius to have been well-built and handsome.
Speaking of well-built . . . you should see some of the first nudes from 1840. Hubba-hubba. That’s right: vanity followed fast on the heels of this new technology, and black-and-white nudes weren’t far behind. Three decades of remarkably clear albumen prints don’t leave a whole Heck of a lot to the imagination. And that was during Queen Victoria’s reign.
The interview between Laura Mirsky and Mark Rotenberg precedes an exhibition of many, many score such photographs that are reproduced in cyanotype-duotone format. It starts innocently enough.
L.M .: “How did you start your collection of erotica and pornography?”
M.R .: “About twenty years ago in Brooklyn Heights, New York, I noticed a lot of activity outside a house two doors down from where I lived, and I saw a man’s body being carted away. About two weeks later, some people hired by the city started throwing things away from the inside of his house into a huge dumpster. I started looking in the dumpster. The first day, the dumpster was knee-deep in girlie magazines. It piqued my interest. I kept looking in the dumpster for the next few days and started seeing newspapers from the Civil War, bits and pieces of erotica, lots of photos—old photos—some of the oldest photos in my collection.”
The Rotenberg Collection, as it’s known to some of us booksellers, stretched by the year 2000 to about 95,000 photos. Those spanned the period 1860-1950. Bloomers and corsets, handlebar moustaches and fine furniture, athletic flexibility and admirable inventiveness are on full display. My hubba-hubba-o-meter goes up to “11” and it fritzed out at first viewing. Laura Mirsky’s introductory essay sets the art form into its proper social and artistic contexts. Their interview recounts a particularly fortuitous dumpster-dive for a collector.
Call me, if you ever find 95,000 of anything, ‘kay?
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