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Forbidden Erotica
Mark Rotenberg took a fancy to collecting vintage erotic photographs when, in the late 1970s, he stumbled across a discarded pile of risque and pornographic photos in Brooklyn, New York. He undertook a mission to find lost and forgotten erotic photographs and has gone to great lengths to do so. His collection, one of the largest of its kind, currently tops out at about 95,000 photos covering the period from 1860 to 1960.
Taschen's second book drawing from Rotenberg's collection features wild, hardcore photographs that would make your grandmother squirm. How odd it is to see ladies in bloomers and corsets with men sporting handlebar moustaches in the raunchiest of poses! There's no mistaking it - kinky sex is not a recent invention. The Rotenberg Collection, Volume II: Forbidden Erotica is a unique opportunity to peek behind history's closed doors.
576 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 8, 2011
A collection of photographs covering the late 19th century to the 1940s. Well, I could go on about the social history aspect, the fascinating insight to social mores but let's face it people, it's porn. And it just goes to show that our ancestors were just as perverse as we are :)
February 6, 2010
This book really is either for very mentally sound historians of sexuality or for very very sad men who really need to get a life.
My interest is quite definitely the former and, from that perspective, it is a reference text - in essence it represents the 'cream' of the Rotenberg collection of pornography (no, not erotica, just downright pornography) from the 1860s through to the 1950s.
But, really, it is, despite the intelligent and sensitive introduction from Laura Mirsky who does not mince words on the exploitation often involved in these photographs, not recommended for your library. If you have any sensitivity at all, male or female, it will just depress you.
We have written before on the sexual culture of the West in fairly disparaging terms (see the essays throughout the 'sexuality-erotica' section of our Goodreads entry). While we must be mindful that this material, though extensive, was only available and of interest to a relatively small number of males, the sheer joylessness of the raw basic hardcore sex in this book, its studied exposures of aroused genitalia without charm or grace and its determined comic attitude to sexuality (like one perpetual dirty joke) show that social repression certainly encouraged repressed minds to see sex as a sad, dirty and underhand business.
On balance, I think Rotenberg has done history a favour in preserving these photographs. The dispassionate adult observer should be interested in such representation because of what it tells us about a culture that we hope is confined now to the margins of the West. Even swinging and dogging culture in the contemporary West attempts to show some 'joie de vivre' and certainly mutual pleasure between equals.
The interview with Rotenberg is also interesting as an insight into the mind of the collector qua collector. It is clear that his initial fascination may have been quite definitely sexual but that the obsessive drive for more material, even the minor risks taken in meeting strange types in parking lots, has more in common with the mind of the determined stamp collector or trainspotter than that of the libertine. This is 'fetishism' of a strangely harmless type.
Much is made of the lack of perfection in the models. Quite the contrary. They are decidely podgy up until the 1920s (or so) and then relatively scrawny. But this is overplayed. The production of hardcore pornography was a very underground matter in which 'image' was less important than delivery of the basics under the counter and with fairly captive customers who could not 'surf' the net for fantasies that might force entrepreneurs to compete for high-paid models or trawl Eastern Europe for hungry young beauties. The market gave little incentive for producers to refine their product beyond the basic because the market was small and at the harder end.
The only time that this material moves an edge above the brutal, boring and trite is when, very occasionally, it apes high art. The late nineteenth century seemed to like bulky Rubenesque older women. A very few shots are like watching the Belgian master come to life. More interesting is the political sub-text of anti-clerical pornography where nuns and priests engage in fellatio and other sexual conduct in photography that self-evidently apes the Spanish tradition of sacred painting that so influenced the tacky religious pictures that would be found in churches, schools and hospitals across Catholic Europe.
This sexual anticlericalism is an ancient feature of European culture with an immensely long pedigree. It is really about resentment of hypocrisy and of the comfortable lives (as others saw it) of the oppressive moral guides who told late Victorian men and women what was right and what was wrong in sexual matters. However, this material is exceptional in its cultural meaning. Most of the material has no meaning - it says very little more than that hardcore sexuality was not about liberation as it has been to some extent since the 1970s but about something else, almost certainly aggression and even (somewhere in there) hatred.
I am not convinced that this hatred was as simplistically misogynistic as feminist theorists like to think. I think it was self-hatred amongst men for their own entrapment, of what they had become under a repressive morality that gave no space for sexual self-expression except in terms of the whore observed or copulated with in secret. The aggressive gaze is rarely directed at the woman and actual 'violence' appears to be formalised and very limited. Instead the aggressive gaze is directed outwards at the voyeur as if to say: 'See, I am doing what you would like to do. I have the power even though I am the low-life with the whore. I have freedom in my degradation and you have slavery in your respectability."
Maybe I am reading too much into pictures that have (for me) no erotic content whatsoever. It is not just technological weaknesses in the media being used nor the fact that the women are overweight, the costumes ridiculous and the 'jokes' deeply unfunny (and I am no prude) but the overwhelming sense that these people are scarcely more interesting than performing animals at a circus.
And perhaps I have hit on a point here. Today, few of us feel comfortable watching animals at a circus. We know animals are not humans but we have long since granted them some sort of rights and one right is not observing them perform unnatural tricks. These photographs come from the age of circuses - they are for respectable but ignorant people who want to watch creatures alien to their everyday world perform 'tricks'. A surprising number of these photographs (at least before the 1920s) involve improbable gymnastics and angles designed to show 'how it is done' - the analogy with the seal with a ball on its nose or the bear dancing is apposite.
One day historians will see the Victorian and Catholic eras in industrial Europe as a quintessential age of cruelty and, though I would not labour the point, it was certainly an era of appalling working conditions for the majority, militarism and eventual mass slaughter and the almost forgetful destruction of indigenous peoples as empire expanded. The cruelty of existence under enormous pressure to conform to certain cold ethical standards (of respectability, of compliance and conscription and of hard struggle to build lives in dull pioneer settlements under the eye of the preacher) created the same callousness that gave us circuses, easy patriotism, imperialism and an objectifying attitude to sexual pleasure.
The hard core material does become much more humane and easier to understand as persons engaged in pleasure as the 1920s moves towards the 1950s. It is no less dull but the gaze does seem to be directed to the other participant rather than be a performance for the voyeur. We are moving towards the modern age. It is as if people are slowly learning to empathise with one another - just! One may speculate whether Hollywood was critical in shifting the visual mind (as opposed to the literary sensibility) from cold observation as an aid to masturbation and obsession to one of imaginative engagement in what was being seen.
A grim book. Reading it is an experience you might undertake in order to know better the human condition but it is not one to ennoble the human spirit.
My interest is quite definitely the former and, from that perspective, it is a reference text - in essence it represents the 'cream' of the Rotenberg collection of pornography (no, not erotica, just downright pornography) from the 1860s through to the 1950s.
But, really, it is, despite the intelligent and sensitive introduction from Laura Mirsky who does not mince words on the exploitation often involved in these photographs, not recommended for your library. If you have any sensitivity at all, male or female, it will just depress you.
We have written before on the sexual culture of the West in fairly disparaging terms (see the essays throughout the 'sexuality-erotica' section of our Goodreads entry). While we must be mindful that this material, though extensive, was only available and of interest to a relatively small number of males, the sheer joylessness of the raw basic hardcore sex in this book, its studied exposures of aroused genitalia without charm or grace and its determined comic attitude to sexuality (like one perpetual dirty joke) show that social repression certainly encouraged repressed minds to see sex as a sad, dirty and underhand business.
On balance, I think Rotenberg has done history a favour in preserving these photographs. The dispassionate adult observer should be interested in such representation because of what it tells us about a culture that we hope is confined now to the margins of the West. Even swinging and dogging culture in the contemporary West attempts to show some 'joie de vivre' and certainly mutual pleasure between equals.
The interview with Rotenberg is also interesting as an insight into the mind of the collector qua collector. It is clear that his initial fascination may have been quite definitely sexual but that the obsessive drive for more material, even the minor risks taken in meeting strange types in parking lots, has more in common with the mind of the determined stamp collector or trainspotter than that of the libertine. This is 'fetishism' of a strangely harmless type.
Much is made of the lack of perfection in the models. Quite the contrary. They are decidely podgy up until the 1920s (or so) and then relatively scrawny. But this is overplayed. The production of hardcore pornography was a very underground matter in which 'image' was less important than delivery of the basics under the counter and with fairly captive customers who could not 'surf' the net for fantasies that might force entrepreneurs to compete for high-paid models or trawl Eastern Europe for hungry young beauties. The market gave little incentive for producers to refine their product beyond the basic because the market was small and at the harder end.
The only time that this material moves an edge above the brutal, boring and trite is when, very occasionally, it apes high art. The late nineteenth century seemed to like bulky Rubenesque older women. A very few shots are like watching the Belgian master come to life. More interesting is the political sub-text of anti-clerical pornography where nuns and priests engage in fellatio and other sexual conduct in photography that self-evidently apes the Spanish tradition of sacred painting that so influenced the tacky religious pictures that would be found in churches, schools and hospitals across Catholic Europe.
This sexual anticlericalism is an ancient feature of European culture with an immensely long pedigree. It is really about resentment of hypocrisy and of the comfortable lives (as others saw it) of the oppressive moral guides who told late Victorian men and women what was right and what was wrong in sexual matters. However, this material is exceptional in its cultural meaning. Most of the material has no meaning - it says very little more than that hardcore sexuality was not about liberation as it has been to some extent since the 1970s but about something else, almost certainly aggression and even (somewhere in there) hatred.
I am not convinced that this hatred was as simplistically misogynistic as feminist theorists like to think. I think it was self-hatred amongst men for their own entrapment, of what they had become under a repressive morality that gave no space for sexual self-expression except in terms of the whore observed or copulated with in secret. The aggressive gaze is rarely directed at the woman and actual 'violence' appears to be formalised and very limited. Instead the aggressive gaze is directed outwards at the voyeur as if to say: 'See, I am doing what you would like to do. I have the power even though I am the low-life with the whore. I have freedom in my degradation and you have slavery in your respectability."
Maybe I am reading too much into pictures that have (for me) no erotic content whatsoever. It is not just technological weaknesses in the media being used nor the fact that the women are overweight, the costumes ridiculous and the 'jokes' deeply unfunny (and I am no prude) but the overwhelming sense that these people are scarcely more interesting than performing animals at a circus.
And perhaps I have hit on a point here. Today, few of us feel comfortable watching animals at a circus. We know animals are not humans but we have long since granted them some sort of rights and one right is not observing them perform unnatural tricks. These photographs come from the age of circuses - they are for respectable but ignorant people who want to watch creatures alien to their everyday world perform 'tricks'. A surprising number of these photographs (at least before the 1920s) involve improbable gymnastics and angles designed to show 'how it is done' - the analogy with the seal with a ball on its nose or the bear dancing is apposite.
One day historians will see the Victorian and Catholic eras in industrial Europe as a quintessential age of cruelty and, though I would not labour the point, it was certainly an era of appalling working conditions for the majority, militarism and eventual mass slaughter and the almost forgetful destruction of indigenous peoples as empire expanded. The cruelty of existence under enormous pressure to conform to certain cold ethical standards (of respectability, of compliance and conscription and of hard struggle to build lives in dull pioneer settlements under the eye of the preacher) created the same callousness that gave us circuses, easy patriotism, imperialism and an objectifying attitude to sexual pleasure.
The hard core material does become much more humane and easier to understand as persons engaged in pleasure as the 1920s moves towards the 1950s. It is no less dull but the gaze does seem to be directed to the other participant rather than be a performance for the voyeur. We are moving towards the modern age. It is as if people are slowly learning to empathise with one another - just! One may speculate whether Hollywood was critical in shifting the visual mind (as opposed to the literary sensibility) from cold observation as an aid to masturbation and obsession to one of imaginative engagement in what was being seen.
A grim book. Reading it is an experience you might undertake in order to know better the human condition but it is not one to ennoble the human spirit.
January 24, 2023
Only about 20 pages of about 475 are text; the rest are reproductions of the photos from the collection, which may be good or bad depending on one's reason for wanting to look at this book.
The brief introductory interview talks about Rotenberg's method of collecting, which was mostly taking images from dumpsters and buying collections off anonymous sources in parking lots. The result is several hundred decontextualized, anonymous images. This limits the amount of analysis one can do of the images and helps render a certain sameness to the photographs.
As to the images themselves, I do think some judicious editing could have been applied, as the vast majority of the photos shown are fairly boring, sanitized piv sex. Beyond that there is a wide variety of sexual activities depicted by people of a variety of races and body shapes. The collection definitely illustrates that the idea of "performing sexiness" is a relatively recent one. People demonstrate various sex acts for the camera but it's very apparent from their facial expressions that pleasure, or even a facsimile of pleasure, is not being depicted. The result is definitely a turn-off for me.
I'm also left wondering at the stories behind the photos. Who are these people? How did they get into this endeavor? Is this a representative sample of sex workers? How many of the women are professionals and how many are civilian women doing these photographs as a one-off? How much were they paid? Was it better than other kinds of sex work? What kinds of people collected these images? Were there things that they were disappointed about the depictions shown?
What kinds of techniques were developed for these photos? Which photos were touched up? What can these images tell us about the first century of commercial photography?
This collection raises far more questions for me than it answers.
The brief introductory interview talks about Rotenberg's method of collecting, which was mostly taking images from dumpsters and buying collections off anonymous sources in parking lots. The result is several hundred decontextualized, anonymous images. This limits the amount of analysis one can do of the images and helps render a certain sameness to the photographs.
As to the images themselves, I do think some judicious editing could have been applied, as the vast majority of the photos shown are fairly boring, sanitized piv sex. Beyond that there is a wide variety of sexual activities depicted by people of a variety of races and body shapes. The collection definitely illustrates that the idea of "performing sexiness" is a relatively recent one. People demonstrate various sex acts for the camera but it's very apparent from their facial expressions that pleasure, or even a facsimile of pleasure, is not being depicted. The result is definitely a turn-off for me.
I'm also left wondering at the stories behind the photos. Who are these people? How did they get into this endeavor? Is this a representative sample of sex workers? How many of the women are professionals and how many are civilian women doing these photographs as a one-off? How much were they paid? Was it better than other kinds of sex work? What kinds of people collected these images? Were there things that they were disappointed about the depictions shown?
What kinds of techniques were developed for these photos? Which photos were touched up? What can these images tell us about the first century of commercial photography?
This collection raises far more questions for me than it answers.
February 5, 2021
Mark Rotenberg started collecting erotica after finding over a thousand photos in a dumpster. Some of his oldest and best stuff is here. While it may be shocking to some, it will only be shocking if you have never been on the Internet and don't believe people had sex before you were born.
While urine, foreign object insertion, and bondage is all pictured, there are also some truly dangerous photos. Interracial couplings and homosexuality/lesbianism were risky acts to engage in during these times, let alone be photographed doing. Respect must be given to all those involved.
If you are a fan of erotica, you will need to get this tome. If you aren't a fan, you'll likely be offended by almost everything you see in these pages. If that isn't recommendation enough . . .
While urine, foreign object insertion, and bondage is all pictured, there are also some truly dangerous photos. Interracial couplings and homosexuality/lesbianism were risky acts to engage in during these times, let alone be photographed doing. Respect must be given to all those involved.
If you are a fan of erotica, you will need to get this tome. If you aren't a fan, you'll likely be offended by almost everything you see in these pages. If that isn't recommendation enough . . .
January 8, 2023
Básicamente, una selección de postales pornográficas antiguas (desde la década de 1870 hasta promediando los años cincuenta) pertenecientes al coleccionista Mark Rotenberg. Muy ilustrativas para asomarse al modo de comerciar (y entender, quizás) en aquellos tiempos un producto cultural tan consumido como clandestino.
December 1, 2021
Not much to report here... lots of old photographs in black and white of all kinds of subject matter... mostly well reproduced.
July 7, 2025
"All models over 118!"
"Keep your fingers crossed you don't find a picture of your grandma!"
"Keep your fingers crossed you don't find a picture of your grandma!"
January 22, 2011
This book is awesome. I was kinda surprised how kinky people were that long ago... leather masks, didoes, golden showers, etc. Great stuff. Proof that people have probably been that uninhibited since the dawn of man.
May 3, 2016
it is revenge on your ex from the late 1900's but a nice try for collecting these goodies, our ancestors were even perverted ..o mama mia! still wants to look at this book, over and over again I thought I was perverted
May 26, 2009
Amazing photos from way way back
October 30, 2011
A beautifully illustrated, comprehensive collection of black and white Victorian erotic nude photographs. :
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews