The Rest of the Brothel Stereo Pics

And now we come to the last two images from our anonymous 20th Century photographer/erotomane. CLICK TO ENLARGE!
These two ladies seem happy for a day in the country, though the one on our right seems to have been recently chastised. Perhaps by the disciplinarian in the last post! In any case, please note the rolled stockings worn by the short-haired lady on the left.
And this lady is looking into a mirror, seemingly contemplating her own image before putting on her corset. Sadly, this is the last of my collection of 1930s stereoscopic erotica. If you see any such thing for sale, on eBay or anywhere, let me know.

Back to the Brothel!

Oh Boy! More swell vintage stereoscopic erotica from France. In the first pair, two ladies are undressing for our intrepid shutterbug.

And in the second, one gives the other a spanking!

What rule of the house did she violate? Did she eat another gal's sack lunch? Did she forget to punch her time card? Click to enlarge! And leave your guesses in the comments!

More French Brothel Stereoscope Images from the 1930s

Oh, boy! This is what you've all been waiting for with baited breath, right?  Here's another outdoorsy one:

And here's a similar pose inside the maison close itself:

This is my favorite of the bunch.  Note the rolled stockings in the second image, as well as the other woman seated on the bed. What is the subject of the photo reaching for under there?

As always, click to enlarge, and view them in stereo if you can!

1930s Stereo Gals!

I will be posting one or two of these a day in hopes of getting back into a good, regular blogging vibe.

These were taken by a French amateur during the 1930s. I'm not sure if he's the same fellow that took the one I posted a few months back, but the style and situations seem similar. (Two of them are outdoor, the rest appear to have been made inside a brothel.)

Oh boy! Upskirt. These seem to have been taken on different days, unless they're two different models. But they're wearing the same shoes!

Anyway, vintage amateur smut for your approval.

The Musical Saw

Here's a stereo image I had scanned by a lab because the original image wasn't showing up in my own scans with  the detail I was able to get from a darkroom. I used to see this fellow occasionally around the Centre Pompidou in Paris. One day in the mid-eighties I asked if I could take his picture and he said okay:

It's a nice 3D image, with the saw and the bow making for some nice relief. As I recall, his playing was haunting and lovely, and he was very good-natured about getting his pitcher took.

Finally, the video....

Below is the link to the book trailer for Nocturne le vendredi, which came out November 2 in France. There will be an English version before the book comes out in the US next June. Ideally I will have  rerecorded the voice-over as I did a poor job the first time; this is all the more frustrating because Lane Davies, doing the voice of the psychopathic actor, gives a great performance.

The whole thing was edited by Jenna Marguerita, who also produced and co-directed the scenes with the actors, ably assisted by a group of students from the film department at Webster University. Thanks to them and to Jenna's company, Bitdepth Productions LLC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcnGPwYwQXA&feature=autoshare

(p.s.: Click the link above, not the pic below.)

Fire Eater

This guy was a regular fixture around the Centre Pompidou in the eighties and early nineties. He was a fire eater, and he also had a repulsive specialty: he could suck his abdominal organs upward until you could damn near see his spine sticking through the skin of his belly (no, I didn't get a picture.) He was French and I believe he'd been a paratrooper (note the tattoo on his biceps) and he was quite gracious about having his picture taken.

This was originally half of a stereograph pair. Until I started cleaning the dust off of this negative digitally I hadn't ever noticed the burn scars on his arms, back and sides.

Taxidermied Sewer Rats, Twenty-five Years On

 Here's what the Arouze Pest Control company in Paris looks like today.....

 And here it is around 1985. As you can see the muskrats at the bottom of the display have been moved over to the other side, and the hanging sewer rats raised.

And here's a closeup of the right side:

Human Remains for Sale, Paris, 1985

I'll bet that headline is going to get me some interesting Google searches. This skeletal hand and its companion foot were on sale at a bookstall on the Left Bank of the Seine in that halcyon summer of 1985:

Sorry I've been backsliding this week! I've been busy scanning and cleaning up old negatives like this one. Tomorrow I head for Oxford, Mississippi to talk to my friend Jack Pendarvis's class about Wichita in the 1940s, thence to Atlanta, Georgia to record some video with my friend Lane Davies, thence to Columbia, Tennessee to see my cousin Lindsey Page and then to Nashville to visit Roy Acuff's Record Store! So believe you me I will have lots to blog about.

Pretty Cityscapes

Some of you probably think this blog is turning into a mere outlet for vintage cheesecake. Not so! Just to prove otherwise, here are two colorful views of famous cities: (CLICK TO ENLARGE!)

This is Paris, France, photographed from (I think) the top of the Montparnasse Tower.

And this is a street scene from Brussels, Belgium in 1984.

Next time: more vintage gals!

Dubonnet Ghost Sign and the Magic of the Digital Darkroom

Here's a picture I shot on Ektachrome in the summer of 1983 of one of the last Dubonnet wall paintings. The slide itself is disgustingly moldy, the mold attracting dust, but I was able through the magic of the digital darkroom to get this lovely image:

Here's what it looked like when I scanned it:

Hungry gargoyle

Paris, Tour St. Jacques, mid-eighties. I've always liked this picture because it either looks like the gargoyle is guarding the tots on the carousel or preparing to devour them one by one.

That's all I got today!

Portions for Taxidermied Foxes

 From an Antique Mall in Michigan, a fox kept on a high shelf that made him difficult to photograph:

 Even at this angle, though, you can tell he's a bit moth-eaten:

Here's a prettier one from the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt in Paris, circa 1986:

 

And look, he's got flowers in his mouth. Just like a real fox.

Another French Book Poster

CLICK TO ENLARGE!

















I picked this up already framed in Paris a few years back for about fifty Euros. It's a lithographed advertisement for "La Porteuse de Pain," a popular novel of the 1880s by Xavier Montépin. A huge bestseller in its day, it's still in print, and as Montépin's French Wikipedia entry points out, it's been adapted for stage, screen and television. The ad is for the first installment of the book's serialization.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_de_Montépin
(If you don't read French, one interesting fact in the article is that one secret of his phenomenally prolific output was the extensive use of ghostwriters.)

I don't know how many copies of this there are floating around, but here's one from the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée, and I know that the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris has one also:
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/cf/htm/CPicZ.aspx?E=2C6NU07A8UCT
This one is unique (as far as I know), though, in that it has had addenda pasted onto it stating that the first installment is free. (Shades of modern viral marketing campaigns.)

Get a load of this beautiful litho:

(Sorry about the glare. That's some cheap glass on there and I'm too thrifty to get it reframed.)

Hey! Remember me?

All right, I'm the world's most unreliable blogger. I'd make some excuse like "I was busy" or "I had better things to do" but the fact of the matter is I am a lazy SOB.

Anyway, I went to France a month ago in preparation for a TV movie based on a book that's coming out there in September, Nocturne le vendredi. A large chunk of the book is set in an abandoned industrial kitchen underneath a women's dormitory owned by the University of Paris. There was some concern about this regarding the film adaptation, because the producers and my editor assumed I'd made the place up.

Not so! In fact, it's a building whose cafeteria I managed back in the early eighties. The building's director is still a good friend of mine and she and a colleague (who's the daughter of the woman who ran the building back in the day, I knew her as a small child running around the building with her sister) were kind enough to take me and my editor on a guided tour:



And on the way to the airport I shot this footage of the best busker I've heard in a while:

The Wayback machine

In the eighties I managed a cafeteria in a dormitory on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris. We only served a continental breakfast in those days, but earlier in the century the dorm provided three hot meals a day for its several hundred residents, and the abandoned institutional kitchen in the basement was a source of spooky fascination.
Rotting furniture:
Kind of a "Shining" vibe here.
A bin full of sawdust, for what purpose I don't know, unless it was for that time-honored tradition of absorbing vomit off the floor upstairs:
Drawers full of unused silver. Bet that drawer is empty today.
The building's main elevator would take you down there, but the only way down from the cafeteria was via a very rickety old spiral staircase, and it was dark as hell down there. I am not ashamed to admit that I was scared shitless every time I had to go down there by myself.

As always, click to enlarge! (Images copyright Scott Phillips, 2010)

RAT TRAP!

This is from 1985, an exterminator's window in les Halles in Paris. Les Halles was once the city's main food market, and was a real magnet for vermin. The rats in the window were caught and taxidermed...taxidermied...stuffed in the 1920s. I'm not sure whether the shop is there any more, but I've always liked the Atget-esque aspect of this picture. The scan is a pointed reminder to me that I need a better negative scanner, as I have any number of better prints of this same negative hidden away in dark corners of my abode.