CATALOGUE NUMBER 1
NEVER KNOWINGLY OVERDRESSED THE OFFICIAL PAMELA GREEN WEBSITE
WWW.PAMELA-GREEN.COM
How to take Glamour Studies by Harrison Marks
Working in the field of theatrical photography, George Harrison Marks had the good fortune to capture on film some of the most beautiful women in show business; through trial and error, he eventually came to specialise in glamour or “pinup� photography. Asked to reveal the formula for his success, he wrote a series of articles for FOTO magazine in the 1950s, and these are collected here for the first time. You can download a FREE copy of this 67-page book when you subscribe to our mailing list at: www.pamela-green.com PDF: 67 pages Size: 127 mm x 203 mm
3
The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks by Franklyn Wood
When this book first appeared in 1967, public interest in glamour photographer and magazine publisher George Harrison Marks was perhaps at an all-time high. Just who was this man with the beatnik beard, the thick frame glasses and the apparent dream job of photographing beautiful women in a state of undress? The author Franklyn Wood, formerly an Art Editor at The Times, was the first editor in Fleet Street to run a diary (in The Daily Sketch) under his own name. He wrote numerous features in The Sunday Times, News of the World and other popular Sunday newspapers on a variety of subjects, ranging from shock, horror and scandal exposĂŠs to business news. Paperback: 180 pages Size: 127 mm x 203 mm ÂŁ9.99/$12.99
4
THE STEPHEN GLASS COLLECTION
Amazons of Yesteryear: Wrestling Women of the 1940s and ’50s
by Yahya El-Droubie with illustrations by Colin Gordon Satisfy your passions for female combat and nostalgia with this collection of rarely seen photos of bare-breasted female wrestlers of the 1940s and ’50s. Blood, sweat, tears, and plenty of writhing. Punch, bam, body-slam; she hits the mat, as she gets put on her back! Hardback: 34 pages Size: 203 mm x 254 mm £12.99/$16.99
5
THE STEPHEN GLASS COLLECTION
Nudist Camp Follies
by Yahya El-Droubie with illustrations by Colin Gordon Those who have enjoyed our other titles on this topic will appreciate this further collection of camera studies. In this volume we take an intimate look at the natural and free atmosphere of the Sun Clubs. Many of these pictures were taken just outside London, between Watford and St. Albans, where there are four nudist camps, all of which have proved popular with photographers over the years. The book features well-known models such as Pamela Green and Lee Sothern. Paperback: 46 pages Size: 203 mm x 254 mm £13.99/$17.99
Left: Pamela Green photographed in the grounds of Spielplatz while posing as Artemis the Greek goddess of the hunt, 1951.
with his own studios at 183 Kings Road, Chelsea, and later at 41 Paradise Walk, SW3. One of his clients was Odhams Press who published Lilliput, a pocketsized gentleman’s magazine that featured an assortment of titillating articles and risqué humour, together with adventurous photographic essays from such wellknown talents as Bill Brandt and Brassai. His brother Stephen, who also fled Europe due to the Second World War, carved out a name for himself taking pictures for such publications as The Naturist and Health and Efficiency. The well-known Pamela Green (1929-2010) modelled for Stephen several times at the infamous nudist camp Spielplatz in Bricket Wood and at his tiny first-floor studio in Old Church Street, just of the Kings Road in Chelsea. “In those days, when Stephen photographed me, I still had dark hair. He liked his props, especially stuffed animals.” It was Pamela’s agent Pearl Beresford, who sent her along to his brother, Zoltán, whose studio on the Kings Road was enormous by comparison. Unlike Stephen, Zoltán was brisk and businesslike. nudist camp follies | 7
Right: Audrey Wayne and Anita Smith.
12 | nudist camp follies
6
THE STEPHEN GLASS COLLECTION
Naked in the Menagerie
by Yahya El-Droubie with illustrations by Colin Gordon Here’s another vintage collection of nude photographs. This time, we take a playful look at Eve, accompanied by her animal friends. It’s a portable exhibition of unusual images that will have you harking back to more innocent times. Photographed in the studio and on location in a nudist camp, and featuring among other creatures, Grandma’s stuffed cat. Paperback: 48 pages Size: 203 mm x 254 mm £13.99/$17.99
Introduction THE PHOTOGRAPHER STEPHEN GLASS is a bit of an enigma. He was well-known enough during the 1950s for his name to be prominently displayed on the front of magazines to help sell them, but very little actually was written about him or his work. This situation differs somewhat from that of his elder brother, Zoltán Glass, who was also a photographer. Known to his friends as “Zolly” he was featured and interviewed in numerous magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Zoltán was born in Budapest on April 26, 1903. He began his career as a cartoonist and retoucher for a local newspaper, but in 1925 he moved to Berlin, where he found regular employment as the picture editor of a Berlin evening paper, before moving on to the Berliner Tagblatt as a photojournalist. He prospered and was soon able to develop a thriving freelance business as a commercial photographer and journalist. He established Reclaphot, a photographic agency that specialised in advertising work, and Autophot, a company dedicated exclusively to automobile
After the war, he eked out a living taking publicity stills for clients in the film and theatrical worlds. His career took a big step up when the Hungarian Arpad Elfer who was Creative Director of Colman, Prentis & Varley, one of the most prestigious London ad agencies started giving him work. By the mid-Fifties, he
Sir Thomas More invented an imaginary island, which he named Utopia, meaning ‘nowhere’ to explain his idea of what a perfect world should be like. In this too imperfect age, we could all do with occasionnal glimpses of perfect beauty such as the camera has secured in these pages.
was one of the most successful fashion and advertising photographers in London
– Benson Herbert
photography. He was an amateur racer and keen motorsport enthusiast, and he covered Germany’s biggest races at the Nurburgring and the Avus circuit, near Berlin. His most famous photos are of the Mercedes-Benz Silver Arrows team, which dominated Grand Prix racing in the mid-1930s. With the rise of Hitler, however, business became increasingly difficult, and he fled to London. As an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II, he was not permitted to pursue his profession and faced the threat of internment, so he voluntarily handed over his camera equipment to the British authorities.
4 | naked in the menagerie
naked in the menageriE | 5
naked in the menageriE | 13
7
Doing Rude Things
by David McGillivray with a foreword by Pamela Green Doing Rude Things: The History of the British Sex Film was orginally published in 1992. It was the first serious study of a genre which, if not forgotten, was universally denounced and denigrated. Yet the book was highly influential; it led to numerous film seasons and festivals, and in 1995 the BBC turned it into a documentary. The 25th-anniversary edition is vastly expanded and updated, with new chapters and photographs, and brings the story of British prudishness and censorship bang up-to-date. Hardback: 172 pages Size: 203 mm x 254 mm £17.99/$26.99
coined today by pundits speaking disparagingly of the naturist
a Russian invention which involved the audience standing
were next out of the Long-Miller stable. In both these cases the
ethos. Was it intended to be tongue-in-cheek in 1962?
inside a 360° screen. A novelty during the London tourist
reward for enduring the unpleasantries, which included a hair
Long: “Yeah, it was.”
season, it later flopped in Blackpool and Glasgow and was
transplant operation and the killing of a battery chicken, was
Really?
abandoned before the project had recovered its costs. But for
sex: striptease, a woman giving birth, and the reconstruction
“All right, no, it wasn’t. I’ll tell you what it was. It was just
Long it posed several enjoyable challenges, one of which is that
of a wife-swapping party (a subject to which Long was later
a contrived title to excite the type of patron these films were
cameras shooting a complete 360° angle will inevitably photo-
to return.)
aimed at. I mean, taking off your clothes is a bit naughty, and
graph the crew. (They eventually hid by crouching under the
The inclusion of such hitherto forbidden material was the
then... live... I mean, that suggests Take Off Your Clothes and
duralumin plate on which the eleven cameras were mounted.)
result of Sixties permissiveness breaking down the bounds of
Fuck. I suppose that was the thinking behind it: that it might
Mondo Cane (1962), the Italian shockumentary which
censorship. In 2017 essayist Andrew Martin also theorised
imply sexual activity.”
dwelled gloatingly on various aspects of man’s savagery,
that guilt was declining exponentially with the decline of re-
In 1964 Long and Miller were asked to make the first (and,
spawned dozens of imitations during the Sixties, two of which
ligion. The graphic depiction of sexuality was still some years
as it turned out, the last) British travelogue in Circlorama,
– London in the Raw (1964) and Primitive London (1965) –
off, but the degree of liberation achieved in the mid-Sixties was apparent in the names of the films themselves. In 1960 foreign sexploitation films were still being given English titles which reflected the British audience’s guilty conscience: Forgive Us Our Trespasses (1957); Girl of Shame (1959); Sins of Youth and Let’s Be Daring, Madame (both 1960). But in 1964 the BBFC allowed an Italian film, L’amore difficile, to be given the shamelessly open title Sex Can Be Difficult, and henceforward it was sex, and not vice, corruption and nudity, that sold the exploitation film. It was in this enlightened atmosphere that Long and Miller produced their first unadulterated sex film, Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1965). Originally intended as a straightforward record of the last nude revue presented at the Windmill Theatre, its cramped dance routines and comic fillers were later woven into a fictitious story concerning a detective’s investigations into the death of a former Windmill girl. Important as documentary evidence of the kind of tat that inflamed the senses of a million voyeurs during the three decades the Windmill operated non-stop revue, the film is also of interest in that it features early – clothed – appearances by singer-actress Dana Gillespie and Oscar nominee Pauline Collins, as well as William Graham, a Windmill dancer who had begun his screen career as a child in the 1940s as Richmal Crompton’s
Above: The title references a now defunct Sunday newspaper. Valerie Singleton, who narrated Nudes of the World, declined an invitation to the launch of Doing Rude Things in 1992.
Above: Britain’s last nudie. Made in 1963 but unreleased for three years, it played as a second feature. Spoiler alert: Sandy (Annette Briand) sheds her inhibitions and becomes a nudist.
Above top: The only shock in London in the Raw was the hair transplant operation. Above bottom: The still from London in the Raw used for the British Film Institute’s DVD release.
Just William. Shortly after the film’s release Stanley Long and Arnold Louis Miller went their separate ways. For Long the split was especially beneficial, leading as it did to a range of work far
50 | CHAPTER 2
him this was at Ealing Studios, where he learned about light-
CHAPTER 2 | 51
Bettie Page, Green also wielded an influence over Marks, and
ing from Czech cinematographer Otto Heller and helped the
thereby the development of British nude photography, hither-
ancient cinema pioneer Cecil Hepworth, who “used to bugger
to acknowledged only by those in the trade. “Some photogra-
about on a Moviola”. Pamela Green’s memory, however, was
phers of renown,” said Peter Sykes, editor of Men Only maga-
that Marks told her he lugged film cans around at Pathé News.
zine, in 1974, “maintain that it was she who made Harrison
She was reasonably sure he did not meet Otto Heller until
Marks and that he would never have amounted to very much
1959, when Marks visited the set of Green’s first film, Peeping
without her.” Surprisingly Marks already had acknowledged
Tom, which Heller lit. Whatever the case, Marks seems to have
Green’s importance. In the 1967 biography The Naked Truth
observed enough camera technique to enable him to switch
About Harrison Marks, he said, “Pam set me up, she started it
from performing to photography.
all; in many ways I owe much to her.”
He began by snapping his fellow comedians, one of whom,
A former art student who turned to nude modelling to pay
a young unknown stooging for the magician David Nixon,
her way through college, Green not only participated in every
was Norman Wisdom. In 1952 Wisdom was chosen to appear at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Paris to Piccadilly, the London version of the Folies Bergère. Marks used the Wisdom connection to gain further commissions photographing the Prince of Wales showgirls. One of these was Pamela Green.The most famous British nude of the Fifties, Britain’s answer to America’s
56 | CHAPTER 2
8
Above left: The original version of The Naked World of Harrison Marks may be lost. Only an edited black and white version is known to exist. Above right: Trade advert for The Nine Ages of Nakedness, released by nudie pioneer Nat Miller.
Above: Wrestler Bruno Elrington captures June Palmer in the Stone Age segment of The Nine Ages of Nakedness.
CHAPTER 2 | 57
Miniten: Rules of the Game by Yahya El-Droubie with illustrations by Colin Gordon
Invented in the 1930s, Miniten is a tennis-like game played by naturists. Challenging and fun, it can be enjoyed by all. If you’re new to Miniten and want to learn how to play it, this is the book for you. The book features illustrations by Colin Gordon, famed house artist for Chaz Royal’s London Burlesque Festival. His other work includes theatre and gig posters, pinup art, sculpture and animation. Paperback: 30 pages Size: 127 mm x 203 mm £6.99/$9.99
9
Naked as Nature Intended: The Epic tale of a Nudist Picture by Pamela Green with photographs by Douglas Webb
Telling the cinematic story of Harrison Marks’ nudist feature Naked as Nature Intended, the iconic British film that brought us Pamela Green in her birthday suit. Released in 1961, the film was a sensation: queues formed around the block and police were called in to manage the crowds. It stayed on the big screen for more than 17 months. Features behind-the-scenes exclusives and never-before-seen photographs by Douglas Webb, who, during World War II, was the front gunner on the last plane back from the legendary Dambusters Raid. Hardback: 54 pages Size: 203 mm x 254 mm £16.99/$25.00
All in place, Roy lit us. This is where we were to discuss naturism. We all looked blank. By now, it was 1 pm, the unit broke for lunch, and all went to the pub in Macclesfield Street. “Not you lot”. Brason called us back. “You can spend your lunch hour learning your dialogue”. “John”, I said, “There is no dialogue, there has never been any dialogue. Furthermore, he who should have written it is at this moment stuffing himself with smoked salmon sandwiches and enjoying a large drink. I suggest that instead of nagging us, you go and find him”. Grimly Brason left the studio, hauled George away from his lunch and bid him to write. That afternoon we received our few lines, each on separate pieces of paper. The four girls learnt the lines they had to say, but not when or in what order. After endless, “Oh, is it me now ?” and “I’ve forgotten. What do I say ?”, patience was exhausted. Slowly and laboriously, we toiled on. The lure of the sea, sun and sand proved overwhelming, as we longed to move free, as nature intended. Converted to naturism, we threw away our bikini tops. Petrina and I dropped ours somewhat Above: Angela Jones. Right: Angela Jones, Pamela Green and Petrina Foryth basking in the studio lights in Dean Street. Far Right: Bridget Leonard. The film’s publicity material states that “born in Donegal, Ireland, Bridget spent her early years in a small village until she was fifteen and spoke no other tongue than her native Gaelic. Three years ago however, a talent scout working with a Swedish film company in Ireland spotted her and on their return to Sweden she went with them and worked in several films. Bridget first came to England just a year ago to learn English and to study at one of our drama schools. Introduced to Harrison Marks who was very much impressed by her sparkling beauty, she was signed-up to participate in Naked as Nature Intended.” Vital statistics 38"-24"-36".
42
Below and right: The girls outside the rather austere clubhouse at Spielplatz enjoying a drink and a chat.
Although armed with a towel and instructions to keep his “bits” covered, he had a tendency to forget and let the towel drop. In the publicity shots there he was, offending “bits” in full view. They were standing behind an open wire fence which came up to their waists, a rose was climbing up one side of the wire, so I extended the rose and incorporated the offending parts into the leaves. The final shots were a 15 minute sequences of camp activities. We quickly exhausted the table tennis, the swimming and the quoits. Doug did a series of stills of me on a swing. We were filmed talking to the residents and admiring their gardens. After that we all left, getting into the Buick and driving off, waving, supposedly silhouetted against the sunset. George seemed to be very fond of sunsets, it was his misfortune that there were never any.
37
10
All our books are available online from places like Amazon, or direct from us at wolfbait.co.uk
COMING SOON Beauty Off-Duty Relaxed, everyday moments caught on camera. Nymphs and Naiads Beauty unadorned and outdoors. Poise and Pose A magnificent series of photographs of female beauty taken in the studio.
11