Self-proclaimed artist and accused pornographer, Albert Arthur Allen (1886–1962) is purported to have spent his life attempting to photograph the unseeable: the mysterious and unquantifiable qualities that cause one human being to be attracted (physically, emotionally, or spiritually) to another. Though Allen would have almost certainly claimed a greater universality for his work, his scope was in reality quite narrow. Throughout his career, Allen exclusively explored his obsession with photographing women in various states of costume and undress.
Allen was born in 1886 in Massachusetts to a wealthy shipbuilding family. He moved to California in 1907, opened Allen Art Studios in Oakland in 1916, and promptly began photographing nude women in the California landscape. In 1923, Allen crashed his motorcycle into a streetcar, and a subsequent operation fused his right leg into a permanently bent position. After his surgery Allen walked hunched over or with the aid of crutches, and photographed exclusively in the studio for the rest of his artistic life.
Allen’s injury places him in a small but discernable category of disabled or disfigured male photographers who spent their lives photographing nude or semi-nude women. Another member of this category is E.J. Bellocq (1873–1949), a reclusive New Orleans photographer who was described as a “hydrocephalic semi-dwarf”1 by those who knew him. Bellocq is remembered for his portraits of prostitutes, images that are imbued with an uncomfortable combination of relaxed intimacy and palpable sexual tension. The ease of Bellocq’s subjects suggests that they found him asexual (and therefore unthreatening), yet something in the way he photographed these women hints at a frustrated desire to possess them nonetheless.
If Albert Arthur Allen’s own frustrated desire is implicit in his photographs, it is absolutely explicit in his writing. In 1924, he released four portfolios of photographs and an accompanying essay titled “Sex-Appeal.” In a forward to the portfolios, Allen wrote:
As a source of out-let for twenty years of professional experience with women in all walks of life; I am giving vent to a long pent up expression—one of the most human and God-given qualities which may truly be called Sex-Appeal or Human-Appeal.2
Allen’s choice of words (such as “out-let,” “vent,” and “pent up”) make his personal connection to his artistic endeavors almost painfully transparent. “Sex-Appeal” is essentially a study of the striptease, an attempt to investigate through the medium of photography what makes a woman attractive, and to undress her piece by piece until the mystery can be fully revealed. Although Allen’s models are laid bare, the mystery of their appeal is not, and the “ultimate conclusion”3 promised in the beginning of his essay is never achieved, either through words or pictures.
For his “Sex-Appeal” portfolios, Allen photographed his models against simple two-tone backdrops or draped curtains. Some models pose standing, while others recline on a divan upholstered with floral fabric. Other than various types of clothing, the photographs are free of props, with the exception of a pair of wine glasses in one, “added to provide a little erotic atmosphere.”4
In a photograph from Series II of “Sex-Appeal,” a woman identified by Allen as “Model B” stretches out on the divan with her arms over her head. She wears a camisole, stockings rolled down to just above her knees, and slippers, a sartorial state that Allen described as “the most mysterious stage lying just between the nude and the full costume.”5 The photograph is split in two by the backdrop: on one side, Model B is covered by her camisole; on the other, her pubic region is bare and her stockings are in the process of being rolled down. It is the viewer’s choice to dwell on one side or the other, or to attempt to view the photograph (and Model B) as a whole.
Model B’s unsmiling, enigmatic expression could be described as defiant or confrontational. She is displaying herself for Allen and his camera, and she dares him (and us) to take her in. Unlike some of Allen’s other subjects, Model B seems less like a half-undressed, vaguely bored, low-level fashion model, and more like one of the amateurs Allen claimed to prefer: “the woman or the girl from the out-side, who possesses a natural untrained beauty which radiates with a certain appeal.”6 All we can know for sure about Model B is how Allen saw her, and she does indeed “radiate” with either Allen’s reflected desire, her own determination to show him her semi-nude body without shame, or a combination of the two.
In the years following the publication of “Sex-Appeal,” Allen was indicted multiple times for “using a federal agency (the postal service) to mail obscene materials interstate.”7 Allen’s indictments indicate not only the conservative attitude toward nudity of the time, but also a sense of confusion about the basic nature of his work. Allen’s writing on the subject, which oscillates between eccentric rambling and the near-rants of a mentally unbalanced individual, does little to enlighten us as to what Allen really thought he was doing with his photography. Indeed, it is impossible to take the sex out of “Sex-Appeal,” and Allen’s images might very well have functioned as pornography for his clients or Allen himself.
After “Sex-Appeal,” Allen’s photographs became more complex, featuring multiple nude women arranged in elaborate tableaux or scenarios. Slipping into the realm of the absurd, these photographs lack the power of Allen’s earlier work. It was perhaps in “Sex-Appeal” that Allen came closest to photographing the un-photographable. In the charged gaze of Model B, desire is made visible, be it hers, ours, or Allen’s own.
Rosalind Shipley
Albert Arthur Allen, Sex-Appeal (portfolio), c.1925, gelatin silver print, 18.4 x 23.5 cm u SOLARI 94.041.006L