Playboy: 50 Years: The Photographs

by Jim Peterson

Playboy celebrates its 50th anniversary with this lavish collection of the very best of the magazine's photography. More than 250 full-color photographs, chosen from the ten million images preserved in the Playboy archive, chronicle five decades of brilliant, life-affirming art. Playboy: 50 Years revisits the girl next door, the sex symbols, and the gods and goddesses who shaped our culture. It visually tracks the changing politics, fashions, and mores through the frenzied peak of the sexual revolution and beyond - from the almost nostalgic eroticism of the 50s bachelor, a martini his secret of seduction, to the highly charged images of modern sexuality. Celebrity models such as Raquel Welch and Cindy Crawford, along with interview subjects such as Mohammed Ali and Salvador Dali, and infamous bunnies such as Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson reveal all. Portfolios devoted to the bachelor pad, the perfect cocktail, fashion, and sports cars celebrate Playboy as the ultimate wish book. From the history-making red velvet shot of Marilyn Monroe, "posed with nothing on except the radio," to the highly charged images of such masters as Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton, this book is a breath-taking photographic tour de force. The definitive gift of the season, Playboy: 50 Years is also the only book being published in the fall to coincide with the launch of the magazine's 50th anniversary.

Genres: Photography

240 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Dazy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book when i was about 18 and it still sits proudly with my prized collection. Playboy is split 50/50 in it's 'readers' Some read the articles and others look at the pictures. I did both!

[Jeanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Playboy is a great reference for pop culture. This is a lovely book.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

More than just the centerfolds

[rndgmoat · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want an example of a horrifically over-hyped institution, look no further than Playboy. Sure, it published a lot of important articles. But it also mostly existed to sell tacky sex fantasies to dudes deeply invested in patriarchy, all while convincing them it was "subversive" to want to look at naked ladies in bizarrely chaste photographs. The very concept of Playboy is the selling of an adolescent male fantasy, where the women don't look quite real, nothing is ever too explicit (because gross, girl parts) and despite being full of boobies, there is bizarrely very little actual sex energy. Anyway, that's a good chunk of this book. The rest is a bunch of celebrity-worshiping junk, concluding with the kind of lifestyle porn that fueled a deeply wasteful and tacky boomer ecosystem. Yawn.

[Ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

this begins with model images, then images of those who were interviewed, followed by some bare celebrities, artistic images, and then cover images, notice the ever increasing cost.