A Kodachrome Moment with Tonisha Mills
One of the things I enjoy most about collecting photographs is finding original pieces that represent a particular moment in the history of photography. This Kodachrome transparency of model Tonisha Mills is one of those photographs.
Unlike many vintage photographs that circulate today as digital scans or magazine reproductions, this is the original 35mm color transparency. It still carries its Kodak processing marks along with the handwritten filing numbers that were added when it became part of a photographer’s or studio’s working archive.
Tonisha Mills was one of the best known models to appear in men’s magazines during the 1990s, a period when this style of photography was changing. As magazines became more competitive, photographers gradually moved beyond the traditional pin up style that had dominated earlier decades.
That’s what first caught my attention about this slide.
When I first looked at it, I immediately thought about where it fit in that progression. By the 1990s, photographs revealing what lay between a model’s legs were becoming increasingly common, but they were still usually presented with some restraint. Looking back now, this transparency represents an interesting point in the evolution of men’s magazine photography before completely explicit images became commonplace.
The Kodachrome film adds another layer of interest. By the time this photograph was made, digital photography was beginning to appear on the horizon, but professional photographers were still relying heavily on color transparencies for publication and reproduction. Looking at this original slide on a light table is much the same experience the photographer, editor, or magazine art director would have had when deciding whether it was the image they wanted.
That connection to the photographic process is one of the reasons I enjoy collecting original transparencies. They are more than just pictures. They are the original photographs that passed through the hands of the people who created and published them.
If you enjoy discovering unusual pieces of photographic history, take a look through my From My Collections gallery. While you’re there, you’ll also find my editorial, aviation, food, fashion, and fine art photography, my growing Motionpage, and regularly updated Blog. Everything is available at https://www.secondfocus.com
Nude Anna Nicole Smith: The Body That Shook an Industry
This slide of Anna Nicole Smith in my collection shows her nude, beautiful, with an extraordinary body. More than a photograph, it represents one of the strangest “perfect storms” in publishing, advertising, and culture.
Anna Nicole Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan in 1967) was catapulted from a small-town Texas upbringing to global fame almost overnight. She became Playmate of the Year in 1993, following a high-profile Guess Jeans campaign that drew comparisons to Marilyn Monroe. Her celebrity was as much about the headlines — her marriage to oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, battles over his estate, and a reality TV show — as it was about modeling. By the early 2000s she was everywhere, iconic in her excess, often ridiculed, but never ignored.
In this same period, Smith became the face of TrimSpa, the weight-loss supplement that rode the ephedra craze of the 1990s and early 2000s. “TrimSpa, baby!” became as recognizable as her modeling work. Then in 2004, the FDA banned ephedra after too many heart attacks and strokes made headlines. TrimSpa scrambled with a reformulated pill, but it never sold the same.
Even so, Anna Nicole kept the brand alive through sheer celebrity power. Then, in February 2007, she died. Within a year, TrimSpa’s parent company was in bankruptcy. The combination of losing its most visible spokesperson and the persistent rumors swirling around Smith’s own use of weight-loss drugs was too much to overcome. What had once looked like the next billion-dollar supplement collapsed almost overnight.
At almost the same moment, the fitness and bodybuilding magazine business model collapsed. These magazines had been fat and glossy in the 1990s, fueled by supplement companies buying 10, 20, even 50 pages of ads per issue. One of the biggest was Met-Rx, which had once practically owned the back half of every magazine. But the economics changed fast:
- Ephedra disappeared and took much of the fat-burner profits with it.
- TrimSpa imploded in lawsuits and bankruptcy.
- Corporate owners cut spending at Met-Rx and other brands.
- And then the 2008 financial crisis crushed what was left.
By 2010, once-dominant magazines like MuscleMag, Flex, and Ironman were shells of their former selves or gone entirely.
So this slide of Smith isn’t just a collectible transparency. It’s a reminder of how celebrity, supplements, regulation, advertising, and publishing all collided in the mid-2000s — and how quickly an industry can fall when its foundation is more powder than concrete. For me, keeping this slide isn’t only about Anna Nicole Smith as an image. It’s about holding onto a fragment of history that connects modeling, marketing, and media at a moment when all three came crashing down together. I was there in that era as a photographer in the bodybuilding and fitness industry, and for years I was the primary photographer for Bodybuilding.com. Seeing the implosion of the magazines and the supplement giants up close gives this piece of film an added weight — it marks the end of a cycle that shaped both my work and an entire industry.
You can see this and more original slides and transparencies from my archive in From My Collections on my website at https://www.secondfocus.com/gallery/From-My-Collections-Cultural-Erotic/G0000h1LWkCCepcc/
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