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
The Photograph That Forgot Its Name
I bought this 35mm color slide simply because it interested me.
It came mounted in an ordinary cardboard slide carrier with absolutely no identifying information. There is no photographer’s name, no date, no studio stamp, no model identification, and not even a handwritten note to suggest where it came from.
What remains is the photograph itself.
The image shows an unidentified blonde model seated on what appears to be a Louis XV-style stool in a carefully lit studio. The hairstyle, lighting, and the fact that it is a color transparency all suggest it was probably photographed sometime during the 1950s or early 1960s, although without any documentation that can only be an educated guess.
One of the things that attracted me is that it represents a period when glamour photography was changing. Earlier artistic nudes were often presented in black and white, while color transparency film was becoming practical enough for professional photographers and serious amateurs willing to invest in it. Every exposure had to count. There was no instant review, no deleting mistakes, and no Photoshop waiting at the end of the process.
We’ll probably never know whether this was made by a commercial glamour photographer, a camera club member, or simply someone who enjoyed creating carefully crafted studio photographs.
Photography has produced millions, perhaps even billions, of images over the years, but surprisingly few remain connected to the people who created them. Slides become separated from their boxes, handwritten notes disappear, studios close, and estates are dispersed. Eventually an image survives while everything that once explained it is gone.
This transparency is one of those survivors.
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 Motion page, and regularly updated Blog. Everything is available at https://www.secondfocus.com
More Than Erotica, A Forgotten Visual Culture
What interests me about these slides is not simply that they are erotic. If that were the only point, they would have very little meaning to me beyond novelty. What draws me in is that they are physical remnants of an entire visual culture that once existed almost completely outside the modern digital world.
And honestly, the first thing I noticed about this particular slide was the pose. The image is highly erotic. Deliberately so. The model’s body language, the direct eye contact, the styling, and the composition are all constructed to create tension and seduction. There is nothing accidental about it.
But after that initial reaction, my attention shifted to everything surrounding the image. The colors. The styling. The late-1980s glamour aesthetic. The carefully coordinated set design. The way fashion photography, nightclub culture, and erotic imagery all seemed to overlap during that era.
Looking at it now, it feels less like disposable adult material and more like a preserved fragment from a very specific visual moment in history.
The mount itself says “Photorama International,” Krommenie, Holland. There is almost no surviving information online about the company, which somehow makes the slide even more fascinating to me. During the 1970s through early 1990s, the Netherlands was one of the centers of European erotic publishing and mail-order distribution. Before digital photography and internet streaming erased entire industries overnight, companies like this circulated thousands of physical images through catalogs, adult bookstores, camera shops, projection clubs, and collector networks.
People today often forget that erotic photography once existed as physical objects. Not files. Not feeds. Not endless scrolling. Objects.
Actual transparencies mounted in cardboard or plastic. Stored in sleeves. Mailed internationally in envelopes. Viewed on light tables or projected onto walls in darkened rooms.
And unlike major publications such as Playboy or Penthouse, many of these smaller distributors left behind almost no searchable footprint. The companies vanished. The photographers disappeared. The models often became anonymous. The websites never existed. What survives now are the slides themselves.
That is what interests me.
These pieces are becoming accidental historical documents.
The Photorama slide especially sits in a strange and interesting place culturally. If the model had been wearing designer shorts instead of nothing at all, the image could easily pass as a late-1980s fashion editorial. The lighting, composition, coordinated interior styling, and pose all push directly into what later became known as pornochic — that blurred territory where glamour, fashion, music videos, nightlife aesthetics, and erotic photography all started borrowing from each other visually.
And that crossover matters historically.
There was a period where Helmut Newton fashion photography, European glamour magazines, nightclub advertising, soft erotica, VHS box art, and mainstream pop culture all shared visual DNA. Looking back now, these slides become evidence of that overlap.
That is why I started building the “From My Collections (Cultural & Erotic)” archive.
Not to shock people. Not to chase nostalgia. And not simply because the material is erotic.
I’m interested in preserving the visual language of eras that are quietly disappearing. The physical artifacts. The aesthetics. The forgotten distribution systems. The strange little companies that once operated internationally yet now barely exist online at all.
These slides are part photography, part design history, part underground publishing history, and part cultural archaeology.
And once you begin looking at them that way, they stop being disposable images and start becoming time capsules.
You can explore more from my ongoing collections and photography archive at:
https://www.secondfocus.com/
National Camera Day, The Look of Film Never Left
Today is National Camera Day.
I pulled out my Leica IIIf again. It’s been photographed before, and it still holds its place. Not because it’s old, but because it represents a way of working that hasn’t changed as much as people think. And I still have a love of the look of film.
Leica’s origins go back to Oskar Barnack, who took 35mm motion picture film and turned it into a still photography format. That decision made cameras smaller, faster, and far more usable in real-world situations. It shifted photography away from being staged and into something more immediate.
What followed wasn’t just a camera system, it was a look. The color palette you see in Leica work, and hinted at in the LFI Magazine cover behind this camera, is controlled rather than exaggerated. Skin tones stay natural. Colors separate instead of competing.
Then there’s Hasselblad, working at a different pace. Medium format, larger negatives, more deliberate compositions. Where Leica moves quickly, Hasselblad slows everything down. The result is depth, tonal range, and structure.
That carries forward directly into my own work. My long-time preference has been Hasselblad digital, particularly the CCD sensor versions. There’s a specific color palette that comes out of those files that still stands apart. It’s not overly processed, not chasing saturation, just clean, controlled color with depth. It feels closer to film than most modern digital systems.
There’s a reason NASA chose Hasselblad for the Apollo 11 Moon landing. Those images required reliability and the ability to hold detail across extreme conditions. The same qualities show up in controlled studio work, just applied differently.
Film ties all of this together. It forces decisions early. Exposure, contrast, color balance, all set before you ever see the result. That constraint shapes the outcome. Grain becomes texture. Highlights roll instead of breaking. Blacks hold information.
This photograph isn’t about nostalgia. The Leica sits there with its mechanical dials and engraved markings, built to do one thing well. The magazine behind it points to the result, what all of that engineering was built to produce.
And even now, with everything available, that way of seeing still carries through.
More of my photography, from fast food to everything in between, at https://www.secondfocus.com
National Camera Day with my Leica IIIf
A beautiful woman on the cover of Leica’s LFI magazine. A classic Leica camera on top. It’s National Camera Day, and one of my favorite subjects to photograph is beautiful women.
This is my Leica IIIf, a 35mm rangefinder produced between 1950 and 1957 in Wetzlar, Germany. Leica began making 35mm cameras in the 1920s, and these cameras have documented much of the world’s history through the eyes of photographers who carried them.
The IIIf is fully mechanical. No batteries, no screens. You wind the film, set the exposure, and press the shutter. It’s simple, and it still works. Its solid construction means it keeps working long after many other cameras have been set aside.
Photographs seen through a Leica have something special about them. It’s a combination of the lenses, the viewfinder, and the way using a camera like this slows you down to see the frame with intention. See more of my photography at https://www.secondfocus.com
SecondFocus Blog 