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These pieces are becoming accidental historical documents.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
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