Tag Archives: Continental Agency

Photographing naked women–When is enough, enough?

Ideally photographing naked women can be pure art.  As much as a Rodin sculpting the perfect body of a nude goddess.  But where should such nudity end?

I took this picture of Alex more than 20 years ago. Alex picked the location of the photo shoot. I think the picture
is in good taste.

But Twenty Years later YouTube canceled my video channel with no warning whatsoever for showing Pretty Thai women dancing with no hint of breasts or buttocks whatsoever.

Going back twenty years ago, shooting pictures of fully naked women came with the territory. About every two months I’d be driving somewhere new in the United States to cover the Pure Talent Agency’s feature showcases. Which I won’t describe here because I’ve already covered them at Amazon.com where you can buy my latest book.   Extreme Guns and Babes for an Adult World.   But you have to buy the book to find out.

For example, I traveled to Providence Rhode Island to shoot hundreds of pictures a night at Club Fantasies for Pure Talent while staying in the same hotel as the feature entertainers who were performing in the showcase. Three times I’d travel to Big Al’s in Peoria, Illinois to shoot Pure Talent feature showcases. I did at least one showcase at the Lumberyard Strip Club in Des Moines, Ia. (The place really is an adult night club). Later I’d return to cover Miss Nude World at the Lumberyard, and after that I’ve lost count of how many times I’d come back to cover numerous adult events such as SPEW (Sexy Professional Exotic Wrestling) for Big Daddy and Big Mike (the Lumberyard’s G.M.) There would be a feature showcase at Lafayette, Indiana for the Continental Agency, two feature showcases for Pure Talent at the Candy Store in Mobile, Alabama, two more feature showcases for Pure Talent in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and so on.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s no telling how many digital pictures I wound up taking, but it’s has to be 100,000 or so,

and after shooting the Rhode Island Showcase I turned in my Canon G-2 digital camera for the Nikon D-1 X, Nikon’s top of the line professional camera which set me back over $5000 for the camera body plus another $1300 for my favorite lens. By then I had decided that within the limits of what I could afford the women I was shooting deserved the best. Furthermore I was shooting for Pure Talent while writing for Xtreme Magazine, and I was doing professional work with an amateur camera which I felt was like bringing a BB gun to a gun fight. The Nikon D-1 X with the lens I had gotten could easily deliver over 1000 pictures a night at a quality level the other photographers around me could not match.

That lens was so fine that even today I marvel at how it was able to produce a Three D effect. The entertainers seemed to literally be jumping out of their backgrounds.

Lesser lenses simply wouldn’t do it. During all of this I met so many naked ladies that I cannot begin to count them. Such superior results came not because I was the superior photographer. It simply took a lot longer for other professional photographers to catch up. Several of them were having their equipment provided by the magazines they were shooting for and it took awhile for such magazines to catch onto the fact that shooting with film simply was no longer competitive. Photographers shooting next to me had to keep reloading their expensive Nikon film cameras while I was able to shoot over two hundred pictures before I had to pull my memory card out and put a new one in, a process that took less than 10 seconds. Other photographers covering the same events I was covering were using lesser cameras than the D-1 X that were fitted with cheaper lenses. Even today, I can tell a big difference between the heavy 28-70 mm Silent Wave Nikon lens and my much newer 18 by 200 mm Nikon that has anti vibration and all the other bells and whistles that retails for around $600.

And now, with my publishing Extreme Guns and Babes for an Adult World, once again the question has come up over how much photographing naked women  I should allow in the pictures I was publishing?

Sculpture of Venus by Rodin.  So what difference is there really between a master like Rodin sculpting the beautiful female form and Photographing naked women? Both can be pure art.  With the intention of depicting the ideal female form.

For me, the naked female body can be a beautiful thing. While photographing naked women can be an artistic accomplishment that depicts what women should strive for.  If they want to be sexy.    But during the past thirty years or so the average American has put on over 25 pounds, and although the guys compose part of this average the women have been even worse.

Meanwhile clothing styles have evolved into what I will call the gunnysack cut. For men most of whom have pot bellies once they reach a certain age and fat behinds, this amounts to a lot of extra material in the legs and seats of their pants.

For women, garments have evolved into gunny sacks of shapeless cut. Oftentimes they are called suits. But make no mistake, these “suits” were designed to hide the human body. But for those who’ve got it, it’s best to flaunt it. So show it off if you’ve got a nice trim waist or finely sculpted back muscles (Leah Layne comes to mind here who I’ve featured with the Tec 9).

As for naked breasts, if they look nice show them for God’s sake. Most people wouldn’t shirk away at all from a woman who’s breast feeding her baby in public. But for a stripper to expose her breasts on stage, that’s bad. And why is it bad? It’s bad because strip clubs are bad evil places in the eyes of many people. But which is really more beautiful, a trim naked stripper showing off a pair of nicely formed breasts or a woman who’s recently been pregnant, pulling her breasts out of her bloated body to give milk to her baby?

If you ask me the reason so many are offended when a stripper shows off her body, is jealousy compounded by the fact that whenever a prettier, more physically attractive woman shows off her well proportioned body, that act of displaying her beautiful body acts as a sad reminder of the far less attractive woman’s shortcomings.

So, for those who appreciate real beauty in the female body, nakedness is good while wearing gunnysacks amounts to a huge cover up

for all the bad habits the Western world has acquired these past thirty years. Such as gluttony, unwillingness to exercise, too much drinking, and the denial of what one has become. But I’ll also contend that too much of a good thing is just too much.

Today now that I’m living in Pattaya, Thailand which probably has the  best looking women in the whole world, if you took me to six Pattaya go go bars, a couple of my friends might say that two of them are beautiful because the go-go dancers are completely naked.  Whereas the other four are just so-so because the women have clothes on.

But I don’t care because I’m more concerned with how beautiful the women are.  Are they friendly or not friendly.  Will they treat me as a number?  Or will some of the girls try to know me just a little.  Even if ultimately they want to get as much money from me as they can. The same was true in all the American clubs I used to visit.  In the U.S. not only was it important for a club to employ good looking women.  It was equally important that I establish a meaningful rapport with at least one of the girls. So that I could view the women as much more than strippers taking off their clothes. and see them as real people who I either really liked, despised or was ambivalent about.

At Nudes-A-Poppin all 100 of the female contestants are roaming around the outdoor nude beauty pageant completely naked.

Here I’d first meet Dirty Heather, Darien Ross, Pleasure and Pain, Leah Layne, and Amy.  I would feature all six of them in my Extreme Guns and Babes for an Adult World articles. At Nudes-A-Poppin after a few hours all that nudity would overwhelm me.  To the point of my wishing to find women wearing at least some clothing.  Because the slightest physical defect in a contestant’s body detracted from her overall sexuality.  The other thing that bothered me about photographing naked women was when the nudity started to go too far.

I Believe that a woman’s privates should remain private. Now I really don’t have any problems photographing naked women from a distance or in such a manner that her private areas do not appear in the pictures.

Here I must draw a distinction between showcasing a picture of the most exquisitely formed breasts.  And all those vaginal shots that attract so much attention in porn movies. A sculpture of a naked Venus by a Rodin or Michelangelo is art.  While I’d consider a picture displaying a dildo penetrating a woman’s privates to be grotesque. Such pictures diminish the real woman lurking inside a body showing off its most intimate areas.  I see nothing wrong with taking pictures of a woman’s ass. So long as the picture suggests that her body is very beautiful.  Instead of showcasing it as a target for anal penetration.  

Once in awhile I’d be called upon for photographing naked women  sticking dildos up their privates.

I can’t say that a show featuring dildos disgusted me.  But I was bored to death photographing them.

The same would be true about photographing naked women performing oral sex during a shower show.  Once again, I felt that those kinds of pictures diminish the women

Whether they are pretending to get it on in during the shower show or really getting into doing the real thing. In fact this  happened that weekend when Lolly Topps and her boyfriend visited me while I was shooting her for the SKS Xtreme Magazine article.  After doing the shoot with Lolly Topps posing with Vic Meyer’s SKS the three of us had dinner together. And then I took them to one of my favorite St. Louis Metro East strip clubs.

Danny and I were drinking beer together when an angry Lolly Topp came back from visiting the club’s restroom. Lollytops told us that one of the club’s customers had grabbed her breasts. And that she almost slugged the man on the spot. A few minutes later two of the club’s entertainers were practicing cunnilingus in a shower show as the club’s male customers cheered them on.  Which got Lollytopps telling us, “I can’t believe this.  I’ve never seen anything like this in a club before.”

Lolly Tops was just flat out disgusted. Yet how many times had I taken nude pictures of her? And  Club Maximus’s dg calling her a porn star while she was competing for MS. Texas.   But I never thought she did any porn. 

I got to know Lolly pretty well. And whenever I was around her I’d get the most wonderful vibes that I rarely ever felt with other women.

I think it was during the Miss Nude World pageant that I fell asleep in Lolly Topps room for a few minutes.  While she quietly talked with one of the other entertainers. She was just good people and that’s the best explanation I can give of her.

I really don’t know what Lolly Topps is doing right now.  Because I’ve been living in Thailand for the last fifteen years. And although I talked just three days ago with Arianna a Del on Skye I doubt if Arianna could tell me what Montana Steel is up to.  Even though both women live in Louisville.  And that when I first met them they were rooming together in a hotel room Big Al paid for at a Pure Talent Feature Showcase.

But I saw Montana as a very intelligent woman who was as  unpretentious as they come. So I sure don’t want to be publishing any pictures of Montana where men can gawk at her privates. 

As a group these were some of the finest women I’ve ever met. It’s been a real privilege  working with them on the Extreme Magazine photo shoots.

There’s three distinct versions of Extreme Guns and Babes for an Adult World.  I’ve modified some of the pictures down to attract a wider readership.  And I have eliminated  displaying my models’ privates out of respect for the women who did an outstanding job in the photo shoots.   I’ve even covered up all  breast shots even though I have no  problem with displaying them.  I wanted my models’ overall attractiveness to shine in a book that will hopefully be around for a long time. Because if I can.  If I ever had the talent to do it.  I’d prefer for this book to later on be considered as pure art.