As we grow to 2000 Facebook followers (and 2 million hits) I thought to restate the purpose and scope of Vintage Sleaze with the new year. I wrote the following when starting the site. Thanks all! Share with friends!
Vintage Sleaze the daily blog
discovers forgotten artists of the past who worked in the somewhat
dicey but hilarious early smut market. Colorful, funny and often
touching, writer, collector (and Grammy™ nominee)Jim Linderman
writes the text using the vintage cartoon gag, limp-core smut and
risque novelty collection of Victor Minx as a starting point for
examinations into the sexy and sexist days of girlie magazines, gag
digests, back page scams and sideshow midnight rambles. Early
strippers, models, illustrators, artists, photographers, mob-connected
publishers hire amphetamine driven writers (many posing under
pseudonyms) and all mingle together in an amazing orgy of the funny and
often fetishistic follies of the fifties. Linderman is able to
balance the line between the profane and the profound easily, as the
backyard erotica of the time was tame compared to today. Tease and
trash your ancestors refused to admit existed (but bought in huge
piles anyway.) From Tijuana Bibles and inept snapshot salesmen to party
toys and risque postcards, the site shows it all with delicate and
affectionate respect and humor. A entire generation of artistic smut
was rightly eliminated by the women’s movement but there was a glimmer
of merit in the dark corners. Linderman aims to find it and makes no
apologies, and in fact many of the followers of his site are women.
Like a reporter, he digs it up and shares without judging. He
frequently receives mail from relatives of those he profiles and most
seem happy to have had the work of their ancestors found again and
appreciated. Vintage Sleaze runs daily until he runs out!
There
is a Saturday night, Sunday morning logic to Linderman’s madness…his
first project was the Grammy™ nominated Take Me to the Water:
Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography, a collection of
antique photographs and gospel recordings of the religious ceremony
(with Dust to Digital and the original photographs donated to a major
museum) and Camera Club Girls which published over 100 never before
seen hand-painted photographs of Bettie Page and her friends taken by
previously unknown New York amateur photographer Rudolph Rossi. With a
talent for finding the obscure and bringing it back, Vintage Sleaze
shows the possibility of the blog as an art form while bringing
attention to an entire generation of lost and neglected artists who
worked in the underbelly of culture.
Now available as a download ebook for the iPad HERE
The photographs of Rudolph Rossi, which date to the early 1950s, are having their first public showing November 4, 2011 at the Au Boudoir Art Space in Santa Fe. Rossi participated in the Camera Club meetings in NYC in the 1950s (along with notables such as Weegee) where he photographed Bettie Page and other models in the Nude at a time when this was illegal. Rossi delevoped his own work, then hand-painted each black and white photo to give them the illusion of color. Some 125 photographs, nearly all 8 x 10 (the three shown here are 11 x 14) and all are unique, hand-tinted works over 50 years old.
