PCB Yesterday’s Beauties

Yesterday’s Beauties

Although in the images in the present collection take the format of postcards, they were only delivered by “silent post” from to hand to hand. For reasons that are obvious, those hands were male. Naked in front of the mirror in a sumptuos salon, or secluded in a secret garden, draped in the fashionable accessories of the day, these daughters of Eve pose standing, sitting and lying down for spotty adolescents and balding fifty-years-olds, for beery skittleplayers, scarred students from duelling corps and monocled army types. In our presens age of socially acceptable glossy-print nudity, these images may strikes some as “harmless”. But they undoubtedly fulfilled their purpose equally well in their own day. How and why they did so – going beyond simply their aesthetic appeal – cannot be explained in scientific terms, but must be left to the imagination of the individual. We can safely assume, nevertheless, that these pictures were “highly explosiv material”; they were circulating in an age of outward prudism, an age which had yet to achieve the technological progress and accompanying progressiveness which today exposes every last intimate secret in glorious technicolour in our sidewalk kiosks. But how much greater must have been the thrill of passing on these “postcards” as a boastful or roguish hint of success – whether real or dreamed of – with fair sex.