By Mariana Beck
The German publisher, Benedikt Taschen, has done it again: produced yet another fabulous collection of naughty images called The Rotenberg Collection: Forbidden Erotica. Of course, it’s hard to resist any book with a title like that but Taschen consistently produces books and monographs dealing in sexuality that most American publishers refuse to touch with a barge pole.
This latest tome (over 500 pages) is essentially a paean to the "French postcard," which as everybody knows has rarely anything to do with France and is merely a euphemism for a photo depicting naked people either posing or engaging in sexual activity. It’s a very saucy collection of highly explicit, vintage photographs spanning the decades from about 1860 through to the mid-20th century.
Part of what makes this collection so delectable is that it blows Victorian prudery, even 20th-century squeamishness, out of the water. Some of the images are so arcane and bizarre in their inventiveness, it makes you long for the days when photos of naked bodies were just simply that -- and not some surreal fantasy of cartoon bodies rutting in silicone splendor. These are real bodies here -- fat ones, thin ones, skinny and fat -- fucking, sucking and playing in front of the camera.
Erotica collector, Mark Rotenberg, whose collection was started years ago by a fortuitous discovery in a neighbor’s dumpster, has gone on to create one of the largest erotica archives of its kind -- nearly 100,000 photos. What’s so comforting about the 1,300 or so he has chosen to show us in Forbidden Erotica is that no matter how much the culture-at-large has attempted to suppress, outlaw, confiscate or destroy images of this sort, enough of them have survived to remind us that the prudes will never, ever win.
The Rotenberg Collection: Forbidden Erotica with an introduction by Laura Mirsky (Benedikt Taschen Verlag 2000 ISBN 3-8228- 6413-7. 512 pages, paper, $39.99)
