A Master of Erotic Photography

By: Abby DivDate: Feb. 1, 2021

In Le Sex Lab's podcast we are talking about curating erotic art from a veteran in the field of kink, fetish and sex. In the lab to talk about the compendium of Masterpieces of Erotic Photography is Editor, Michelle Olley.

Abigail Div
Hello, everyone, we're going to be talking today about curating erotic art from a veteran in the field of kink, fetish and sex. She's the editor of masterpieces of erotic art with an extensive resume and journalism. I'm your host Abigail Div, founder of the sex lab and experimental Media Lab exploring sexuality and creator of this very podcast featuring media creators and innovators. In today's interview, we'll explore the following. How did Michelle Oh, they come to the editor of the Masterpiece Series. How did she discover works for the books? What made the publication and why? And lastly, if she had to do it all over again, what would be different? With me today to talk all about her curation of a compendium of erotica through history is writer, journalist and book editor Michelle Olay welcome shelf. Hi, Avi. It's lovely to see you. Oh, yeah. Welcome to the sex labs podcast, the list of publications and organizations you've been part of puts you on the top of List of kind of stories in the world of sex. But let's talk about why you're such a good person for the job as an editor of an erotic photography series.

Michelle Olley
Well, it's very kind of you to say that, I think it's got more to do with the fact that I didn't particularly have a strong career plan or a strong career path that I sort of happen to have worked across kind of a number of different erotic genres. So I started out working for skin to magazine when I was 21. I was working in the offices as a kind of office assistant, and also working in the shop downstairs while I was doing my journalism degree. And then I ended up becoming director of the publishing company now. And I was 23. So I was very fortunate to have been there at a particular time when the sort of sexual subculture of the fettucine exploded into the mainstream. It's like 1988 1989. That's kind of when Madonna was out there in a Gaultier course. It's the sex book that she wrote that came out at the same time. And this rave scene and the fettucine kind of met together. So yeah, I was very fortunate. So it's just been in the right place at the right time. Late 80s, early 90s is when the fetish world and the mainstream culture world were kind of cross pollinating. So that meant that whilst I was working on a fetish culture magazine, I was meeting lots of fashion designers and photographers, and people who were working in the kind of world of erotic creativity and expression for a better phrase. So so I knew a lot of fetish photographers, I knew a lot of erotic photographers, I knew a lot of fashion photographers, art photographers. And then when I left skin tear, I went to work for us shoot magazine, which was one of the main Gay Men's lifestyle magazines in the UK. And it was while I was there that I got approached by Carlton publishing, to do a master first in the masterpieces of erotic photography. First, the first of the books, I didn't realize at the time, it was the first one. And that was a book called arm, which was a collection of male nudes. And because I'd come from the fetish world, which is also kind of the fashion world and the nightlife world and the culture world, I was able to bring all of that to this book. So when we first started doing on the criteria was that we wanted to do something that was for gay men and women that kind of worked as a gift, really something that you'd want to give to your lover. So we wanted it to be raunchy, but we didn't want it to be to kind of to pitch a perfect to straightforward, classic nude kind of, sort of like a museum piece. We wanted it to have a little bit more kind of contemporary culture to it. And I was very keen for it to have quite a broad range of contributors as well so that we had everything from the kind of the original photography, the first kind of the really early male erotic photography, which were generally sort of insane ways in classical painting, depictions of sort of classic Greek scenes people like feel then on gold time, please, that's his name. And then really early mail classic news, which were by people like George plotlines, who was a Hollywood portrait photographer for a career, but as a hobby he used to photograph in a male nude, so when he wasn't photographing, but Bette Davis, he was photographing, beautiful, classic, statuesque, male nudes using the same kind of black and white glamour photography techniques, hollywood techniques. So yeah, so we did the hum book and it went down really well. And then they asked me to do a female new book and I applied, I applied the same criteria. I did about six books for them. In the end. We did five photography books after the male and the female we did couples, then we did female couples, then we did one that was exclusively blondes. And by that time, it was kind of like we've sort of the masterpieces. The topics, we're kind of getting a little bit kind of, we're getting a bit ridiculous now. So we finished with a book of modern erotic art called critique, which was a similar kind of criteria. But instead of photographers, what we did was we split it up into different themes. So we started with a kind of whistlestop tour through erotic art. And then we talked about we split them up into two new masters, comic book art pinup art and then kind of surrealist radical art. And then kind of futuristic art forms of a better phrase, which was kind of a bit kind of post traditional erotica a little bit transhumanist, a little bit kind of, you know, the, the Geiger esque kind of stuff.

Abigail Div
Well, my job is done, they don't need to give us over and can wrap it up. But before we do, let's take a step back into your background in terms of how did you get to be the book editor for Carlton, as you had mentioned, you were the editor for Skin Two at a very early age in the UK of 21 of the editors. Yeah, there's the editors. How did you end up getting there? And what role did you play?

Michelle Olley
Well, the answer to that is I was a journalism student. In the second year of our journalism degree, we were all asked to suggest where we'd like to do our summer work experience. Most people put the BBC or the times or timeout or whatever. And I put skin to magazine, partly for a bit of being a bit of a divorce and being a bit of a devil to see whether or not my lecturers would actually phoned them up. Also, because at the time I was really into nightclubbing I was one of those kind of alternative kids with the crimped hair and the bangles and the black eyeliner. And you know, that was kind of my look at the time. A bit a little bit kind of that Bettie Page world I loved my gay disco I love to divine and soft sell and all that kind of thing. And I just started going out to fish clothes because they were one of the few places in the late 80s that were still playing that music because rave was just starting. So it was kind of a little bit kind of behind that curve to be honest. And, and yeah, the the the phone phoned Tim Woodward, who was the publisher of the magazine up and he said does she know how to use an Apple Mac Macintosh computer. And in 1990, in 1988, we were one of the first colleges that had a Mac room. And so because I knew how to use an Apple Mac, I ended up working there over the summer. I do a couple of days on the magazine, trying to sort of make sort out their subscriptions and sort of badgering them saying Why aren't you? Why isn't magazine black and white? Why isn't it color? Why don't you interview? fashion designers? Why don't you interview pop stars? It's like why why Let's do this. Let's do that. So I was a little bit of a nuisance, I think but skin to being such an egalitarian place at the time. And they they kind of they listened to me and they let me do it. So I used to send letters out to people like john Paul Gaultier, and the fashion designer, Pam Hogg, and the band, The cramps, and the writer Clive Barker saying, Oh, can you I would love to interview you about fetish culture and all this kind of imagery and stuff. And some of them wrote back and some of them said yes. And for that reason, I guess I kind of was there pushing for skin to to become more of a popular culture for popular fetish culture magazine, as opposed to strictly a subculture magazine, it was going that way. Anyway, I just happen to be the person who was there at the time that was able to give it that little nudge towards it. So and Tim, Tim and Tony, who were the publisher, and associate editor there at the time, they Yeah, they encouraged me, they were they were really helpful. They were my absolute mentors, and staying there seven and a half years. So I was very much a part of the fetish world and the fetish culture and scene from about 1988 to about 1997, which is just kind of round about the time that I just couldn't really do it anymore. Because I sort of been to every club, I interviewed everybody I wanted to interview and and sort of, I felt like I've done everything that I could in that world. And I was ready to move on. And that was at that time I had a band that was science for major labels. So I was doing music And then when that finished, I went on to work for penthouse when it was relaunching This is the sort of mid to late, late 90s, when the whole lad culture thing was happening and a host of cool Britannia bit Britpop thing was happening and everything was sort of feeling sort of fresh and new, and the whole Girl Power thing. And that whole thing of female empowerment through sexuality was very much happening and the rave music and all of that. So it was it was a very kind of heady time very hedonistic time, and also a time when everything felt possible. So reinventing pornography using a traditional brand seemed perfectly reasonable to me, having worked in fetish subcultures and worked with amazing photographers and fashion designers and artists and models. For the best part of 10 years. I was a little over optimistic with that I lasted about six months trying to reinvent pornography via a penthouse, but it was a it was a an adventure, and a learning curve. But again, that's another little piece of why I had all these contacts. When Carlson contacted me to ask me to do the books. It's like, because I'd been out there in that world meeting all these people. And I had this strange mixture of gay and sort of adult glamour and fetish subculture and dance subculture, contact book,

Abigail Div
Right. And you had also done quite a bit in terms of event management in the fetish and kink scene, having founded the rubber ball, while you're at skin to come about what was the scene like in the early 90s?

Michelle Olley
Well, that was a good question, that part of the reason that we started the rubber ball was because in the sort of very early 90s, had been a bit of a crackdown on fetish clubbing, there'd been a few events and promoters who'd been shut down by the police. And there were kind of expos as happening to various people who were going to those clubs in the British tabloids at the time. So it was attracting quite a bit of negative attention. And, you know, people were feeling a bit persecuted. And Tim, who was the guy who's the publisher of skin to magazine said, I don't think we should do parties anymore skin to started as a party. before my time in the early in the very early 80s. It started in this kind of new romantic scene. And he said, Well, I don't know if we want to do this and draw attention to ourselves. And I persuaded him that what we should do is actually completely draw attention to ourselves and make them make a much more public fetish event make you for charity, invite photographers, make it make it clear to everybody who's attending, that it is a public event. And we'll actually make it like a kind of a what's the word we would actually make it something that was in defiance of this kind of negativity that was all kind of collating around the fetish scene into the shame about it and take the shame out of it by making it for charity, making it very public, and just kind of showing our kind of fun side. So that's how the rubber ball started. Really, it was a bit of defiance against the kind of the way that the fetish scene was being negatively portrayed in the media at the time. And it just again, it just sort of happened in 1992, the, the rave scene and the gay scene and the kind of drug scene things like kinky Blinky, that were based on the voguing balls from New York, those things were just also on the OP and the, the two together, where everything just coalesce beautifully into this, you know, lovely celebration of dressing up and having fun and enjoying your sexuality.

Abigail Div
Wonderful. Yeah. And it sounds like actually that the Penthouse experience and some of your other experiences in art and culture magazines actually co sort of it in a perpendicular direction to that, given how counterculture fit skin to us, and how mainstream things like penthouse UK or and relaunching those in the very tumultuous years of re envisioning your sexual expression in mainstream media.

Michelle Olley
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think it was a very interesting time because I think the late 80s, early 90s when the first thing was coming up when there's sort of Vogue ball drag ball thing was coming up when DIY DJ and house music culture was coming up. There was a there was we had that sense of optimism as a generation and as a as a group of creatives, which I suspect you might have found in the sort of mid to late 60s. It was like we felt a bit invincible. Like if we want to do it, we're just going to do it that punk as well is that you know DIY aesthetic, but then you sort of come across what happens when everything gets co opted in the mainstream. So in the same way that bondage trousers end up in, you know, sort of sitcom comedy punch lines, the whole thing of girl power, and that 90s sort of hedonistic thing, Oasis and all that, that that kind of feeling that or we also kind of became a little bit overexposed. And the idea of wearing a rubber catsuit to, to be empowered, became a bit of a cliche. And a lot of these lads magazines that came up, you know, your F HMS, and loaded magazine, which I don't know, if you had that you didn't really have that in the US, I think it was more fH M was this constant stream of glamour girls talking about being empowered, but they were basically empowered to take their tops off. It's, you know, that thing where it's not quite, it's a little bit of a simulation of empowerment. So I feel very lucky to have been there. Within that moment, where just before it kind of became something that was very marketable and easy to do.

Abigail Div
There must have been a reason that they chose you to be the publisher for these erotic book collections, having had such a diverse experience in both mainstream as well as counterculture publishing.

Michelle Olley
I think that I think that's probably the reason why they kept me on to do six. Yeah, because the first one that I did, it was that fortunate thing of like being I was a woman who had that experience working on a Gay Men's magazine, he was approached to do a male nude photography book. But then when they saw how broad my contact book was, and what other stuff I'd done, they asked me to do the female one, and then all the other ones that came on after it. So yeah, I think I think I was just lucky that I was just in that kind of Venn diagram where sort of traditional erotic glamour, fetish or culture gay, trans that I kind of had enough of a and enough of a toe in all of those different tools, I guess, that I was fortunate to be given an opportunity to put them all together into one thing. And I think that's what I'm most proud of with the anthology is that we've got a bit of everything in there so that you're going into those books, you guaranteed that you don't know everybody or everything in there, unless you know, you have a really broad enthusiasm for erotic culture.

Abigail Div
Great. Yeah, let's take us back to the beginning of the curation process. Hmm. The series is published by Carlson books, as you mentioned, for their yearly international book fairs, to put on the rats among the fashion and the culture counterparts of its publication.

Michelle Olley
Carlton is, I mean, their cotton and now long subsumed into another international publishing company called Welbeck. They'd have the same buildings, I'm sure they have the same stuff. But it's, it's a it's a hugely mainstream publisher, they, they still under the worldwide name, they still publish things like books about well, being cookbooks, TV personalities, diet books, books about soccer teams, books about the history of sports cars, so they're a super mainstream publisher. And they will have one or two sort of slightly more adult focused material, but read more like, you know, a history of history of sex or something like that. So. So we were taking a bit of a box there on their portfolio to cover to cover all the bases for your, you know, gifts under the tree every Christmas. So we we were very much aim to create something that would work in the mainstream that could sit comfortably in a bookshop anywhere across Europe, really. So that was my brief was to create something that was erotic, glamorous, interesting, not too expensive. Obviously, we have a mainstream budget for it. And something something that would last a year or two.

Abigail Div
Until the next publication, right.

Michelle Olley
Until the next publication. Yeah.

Abigail Div
And these books weren't intended to be put behind the black curtain in 21 plus backroom of the bookstore, right.

Michelle Olley
No, no, not at all. In fact, when we, when we had our very first meeting, and one of the things that I asked him said, Well, how explicit am I okay to be and they're like, well, we can have nudity, but not for kind of sexual nudity. So okay, so we can have penises, but we can't have erect penises. We can have nudity, but we can't have explicit nudes See? Okay, gotcha. And then from there, apart from making sure that we have a wide range of different styles of art or photography, it's also a wide range. I wanted a wide range of body types that was quite important to me that we had real diversity in age in shape, and different people from different all over the world. So yeah, we would that there's that diversity. Then on top of that, there's the sort of straightforward putting a book together, you want certain amount of boobs, a certain amount of bombs, you kind of got to get a balance so you don't have too many booms or too many bombs. And enough Willie's for not too many Willies. And I know that sounds ridiculous, but it is a little bit like, you know, when you're making a chili con Carney and you don't want too many kidney beans.

Abigail Div
Too much gas afterwards.

Michelle Olley
You know, I mean, it's like...

Abigail Div
Yeah, I do it. I mean, and just like, you know, a restaurant has to know its market and its demographic I sure you also need to know your target and your demographic. So who was the audience for this?

Michelle Olley
Well, in my mind, it was well, in their mind, it was mainstream couples, or very much sort of people who are open to interesting erotic art, rather than experts. Yeah, it was, it was quite important that it works for the gay and the straight audience. And I think in a way that gives you an interesting that puts you in an interesting liminal space where you can be a bit creative and a bit adventurous both ways, in fact, because it's almost like it's giving, it's giving both demographics, permission to look. But I think yeah, I think, to me, I think that there is just something about trying to create something that has a bit of sincerity and honesty to it, I guess. So not every picture was a perfect, beautiful body. Not every picture was pushing the edge of what's possible. Some were very classic nude, some were very classic glamour, traditional glamour photography, and also a little bit of history. So a little bit of stuff. That's what was considered daring and exciting in the 1970s, or the 1990s. Or, you know, mix it up a bit. I think that's I think that's interesting. I think it's interesting what, what people what people were doing before us, and I'm kind of at the point now, where I'm curious what people are doing afterwards as well, like what people are doing now, because I must admit, I'm not very up on on top of it these days.

Abigail Div
It's a diverse representation of the milieu, the environment that you were working with, and presentation of both. And speaking of the environment, and the time you were working at this is all pre internet, pre digital age. Yes. So there wasn't the same ease of accessing these creators that you have today at your fingertips to send, you know, an email, connect with them on social media, other ways of getting content digitally. So how did you find these photographers, artists, agencies? How did you get in contact with them?

Michelle Olley
Yeah, that's very true. On the first book, I was fortunate that I, again, I had, I knew quite a few of them, the first couple, I knew the ones that I wanted. And the good thing about working with the mainstream publisher is you get a picture editor. And you can give the picture to a list of people to, to approach on your behalf. So it was, in some cases, it was as easy as just giving 20 names to the lady who was a picture editor, I would contact people that I knew or if I knew how to get hold of them. So we did have email back in 1998. So yeah, we do have email. So there's quite a bit of emailing, but there was there was also letters. And then the way that the stuff came back very much depended on the individual. Some of the bigger artists, their agents would send stuff through and quite often it will be contact sheets, or it will be the particular prints that they thought that fitted the brief. So some people would send you three individual beautiful prints, some people would send you contacts, some people wanted you to come around to the art to their house and help them to pick them out so that they were giving you basically access to your archive. I mean, when I when I was doing the erotic art book, there was a an oil painting. There's an oil artist called Michael Leonard who did this beautiful realistics of realism, male nudes, and he invited me around to his house which was a lovely old house in Earls Court and he made me soup. And then he took me upstairs to his studio and he showed me all these amazing, beautiful prints. And some of the originals as well, that wasn't, that was a lovely day. Some of them, you're going to their flats and you're looking through a filing cabinet that is not in any way filed. And you're going through folders full of 35 mil. What do you call them? 35 mil film with a lightbox and taking out images. I mean, some of the photographers, I've got a nightlife photographers, so they will have images from fetish clubs or sex clubs or you know, gay clubs or whatever the kind of raunchy and interesting. And so you're going through nights and nights and nights of Yeah, nightlife. So you can spend hours and hours getting those three, or while I probably take about 12 or 15 with you so that the publisher could, so that Carlton could have a look at them as well and have some kind of input in it. Because final images were usually chosen between me and the main publisher. So yeah, it was, it was a bit of a process. But it was a nice thing to do. You ended up meeting them in situ and talking to them a bit more. And yeah, I have some nice memories of doing that.

Abigail Div
Sounds like an archivists nightmare, in some cases, so to cataloging.

Michelle Olley
Yeah, it would have been a nightmare if I had to go visit all of them, but it was only sort of, I don't know, 15 or 20 of them in total. I think that I went to visit. I went to visit Bob, Bob, Carl's Clark, actually and Bob Carlos Clark is one of the more kind of high end glamour photographers he was. He was a big photographer in the 1980s. He was one of the first guys to do fetish. Like rubber were like to a really high end, he did a lot of album covers for people like the damned and stuff like that. And he was quite posh. And my nickname for him when I used to be working at skin tea was posh Bob, because whenever he phoned up, he always it always felt like he was talking to the maid. But then I went to his house and he was really nice. And I felt really awful about calling posh Bob. But yeah, he he was character very much what you can imagine you could imagine like, Top Model photographing sort of glamorous photographer with a big, high ceilings, lots of lights. home studio, he was telling me stories about doing portraits of Princess Diana, not in rubber, I hasten to add, but yeah, he was a nice man.

Abigail Div
Any particular that you can call offhand save, of course, Bob was of course posh that were a more curious and encounter.

Michelle Olley
Well, I really enjoyed going to see delegates volcano now Dell, when I first met Dell, Dell was one of the still is one of the premium sort of top sn died photographers. And a lot of his stuff is Yeah, I mean, he's has to fit the National Portrait Gallery. He's a big, big, big photographer in the LGBT community, brilliant photographer, I, we had some really interesting conversations around gender and stuff when I went around to see him. And again, it was it was just it was a privilege to go through some of these portfolios and meet them in. It was, that was a memorable day. I it's sort of hard for me to remember now because it's, you know, it's going on 20 years ago when I did this stuff. But it's just being able to go through from early early photographs to the stuff that they're doing now and seeing some of the, some of the progression of the work. It's, it's a privilege to hear that that's kind of like one of my happiest memories that and also, when you do get the big name to agree to do it. And then you go into kotlin and you're looking through the work that they've they've sent they've sent through that's very exciting. Like we got Nan Golding that was very exciting. And having a having a chance to pick some non Golding out for bought was really good. Nick Knight, he's another one Nick Knight is probably one of the top photographers in the UK. He works a lot with Alexander McQueen. He sent us through some of his images of Sophie dolls are just stunning. That was very exciting. Yeah, I mean,

Abigail Div
it's definitely a highlighted list of the famous and noteworthy, of course, art historical figures in contemporary photography.

Michelle Olley
Another one was Tony Ward, who was a kind of very sort of sexy glamour photographer. His stuff was very sort of empowered but very sexy. Tony was wife came to London. I guess she was doing some business with him and we went out for dinner and got quite drunk. That was fun. It's sort of like they're all. They're all great.

Abigail Div
It sounds like you've had some, some very enjoyable encounters, not just curious ones.

Michelle Olley
I might forgotten the bad ones. But I don't think there were any.

Abigail Div
No, it sounds like yeah, those are excellent examples. Let's get on to then talking about different iterations of the project. As you had mentioned earlier, as you've done, couples, you've done women, you've done other themes after you started with the male Homme book. What was the criteria for choosing the work?

Michelle Olley
Well, again, it's like the Carlton didn't really mind who I put forward, as long as we got enough of a variety. And as long as it wasn't straying too far into the avant garde, so I could have a little bit of kind of interesting, sort of, potentially surreal or cutting edge or, yeah, sexually challenging, shall we say? work or even like very artistic and not particularly explicit. That's the other thing as well. As long as as long as the kind of like the overall balance was towards sexy, or convention or sexy, up to a point, but I was always pushing that, so that I could get as much as much of a wide range as possible. It was, it was relatively easy to do with the first two because that was male needs and female needs. Once you get into couples, or female couples or blondes, you're slightly starting to recycle a little bit, because you've already you know, we had couples in the male book and the female, but we had blondes in, you know, all of them. So yeah, yes, you're starting to, it's starting to get a little bit more challenging to find something that isn't just the blondes out of the portfolio out the people that you've already featured. But that's not to say that we didn't find some good work. And the challenge with the blondes work as well was what to write, because there's an introduction that has to be written. So I ended up going into quite a bit of stuff about the mythology of the blonde. And, you know, sort of challenging the idea of the stereotype as well with stuff about, yeah. Jane Mansfield's psychology degree and what have you. Yeah. So I think that's kind of the answer, really, the criteria you never really changed it was it has to be mainstream enough for us, we had to sell it around the world, pile on high. But it also has to be high enough quality that people don't think it's porn. And it also has to be diverse enough that we can sell it to as wide range as a wide range of people without being too edgy to the point where you're now in the audience. So it's a bit of a tightrope. But yeah, we sort of had a formula we stopped to, which was, we would probably let me get away with about 50% of what I wanted to put in there.

Abigail Div
Well of that 50% that didn't make the cut. What did that include?

Michelle Olley
Well, I think I've I know you I know, you wanted to ask me this question. And I've been really scratching my head to think if there's a particular artists that didn't make it in. And I don't think there's a particular artist because I think, I think I've got everybody in. But it was like if it was an art, if it was an artist who they didn't really think met the brief. They would push back against it and one of the ones they push back against I remember quite hard that quite a harsh Porsche was Wolfgang, Wolfgang Tillman's. Now Wolfgang Tillman's was, at the time a very much a fashion photographer, he worked for ID magazine, and you know, all the main fashion magazines. And his style was very naturalistic. So everything he did have this amazing kind of super technical of color, but it was beautiful sharpness. But it also on the surface look like it will quite often be quite mundane, like he would take an amazing photograph of his dinner on a plane. And it's hard to explain it sounds it Yeah, that sounds like nothing but and I really wanted and Wolfgang Tillman's in there and out of the seven or eight pictures that he sent, I got two in one is of a lady waking up in the morning just in filmmaker finish sheet. And the other one is about is to naked people up a tree who aren't conventionally glamorous to naked people on the tree. But then I feel quite vindicated because Wolfgang Tillman's is a Turner prize winning in all the galleries proper artists now, so it was worth the fight. Was there was also i'm gonna i'm not gonna remember the lady's name now but there's an artist I think it might be Allison. What? Pretty sure. It's awesome. What who Did some paintings of bedsheets just creases in bed sheets? It looks really gentle. Looks like a little bit like genitals a little bit like genitals not exactly like genitals. I'm wearing that kind of Georgia O'Keeffe zone where things look like something that then possibly look like something. And I just thought these creases were wonderful. And they were like, well, we don't really get it. It's just a crease. I know you think it looks like a vagina. But is it sexy? And I'm like, Just trust me. So I've got some I've got some Jonas sheet creases in there that I think are really sexy. I'm pretty sure there are Isan Watts

Abigail Div
I guess subjectively sexual opposed to surrealistly, or interpretively, or abstractly, sexual.

Michelle Olley
Things aren't obviously sex.

Abigail Div
They're obviously not a naked person doing something naked, natural, but they're one step removed from that.

Michelle Olley
And not they're not somebody who wants you to look at them in a sexual way, necessarily. But they are that but they have a charge about them. It's like, I think I'll keep coming back to that has to have a charge about it. And I don't, I don't even want to unpack that too much because it's so I think what I think that is the beauty of erotica art. It is quite subjective. And as a curator, sometimes you find something that you kind of, don't really understand why you're drawn to it. And that's a reason to put it in. If you've got if you've got the space. If you're doing something where you've got the space, then I think something that ask makes you ask questions about it. That's a valid, that's a valid piece of art for the project. So yeah, those are the ones I had to fight for the ones I wasn't quite sure why, but I just knew they had to be in there.

Abigail Div
Yeah, it takes context and an understanding of the material. Of course, just like if you go into a museum and look at a piece of art, that's very important to understanding what makes it valuable and why it's on that wall. It says the same way I think in curating erotic content for a photography series is that a lot of this is built into positioning and repositioning and context of course, and understanding what where they missed you earlier, the balancing point comes into sex and art and commerce and fashion and fetish wear and all these other elements that combine to make it sexual in nature.

Michelle Olley
And narrative as well. So that something that sometimes makes you kind of want to want to look at it for longer and figure it out. Sometimes it's a figuring out thing. It's kind of it's kind of it, it's sort of hard, I don't really think about, I don't really think about the curation of these books every day. I haven't thought about them. Since probably Yeah, I haven't thought about them in 15 years or something. So it's, it's kind of nice to go back to it. But it does feel like another country in a little bit of a way. So to go back there is to go through the looking glass again and think, gosh, what was I thinking then? And I look at them. And I think I have a high higher look at them with a new eye now as well. And I'm actually a bit delighted. I'm quite pleased with them. I looked at them in 10 years. And it's like, oh, yeah, that guy. Oh, that was great. I loved her. She's great, and so on.

Abigail Div
That's wonderful. And as you were saying the series was published between 1999 and 2011. So yeah, who has done well, so...

Michelle Olley
2004 is actually the last time that I created one because the 2011 one is a second edition of the erotic art anthology. So that's a reprint of the one that I did in 2004. That came out in 2005. So it's 15 years since I actually did them.

Abigail Div
Oh, yeah. And while the series does stand the test of time, it's also a marker of the times in which it was made. Let's just say that you have a chance to go back to this series again, and re-curate what would be different about the content?

Michelle Olley
Well, if I were to go back in time and re-curate, I'm not to be honest, they probably end up exactly the same, because though, they're a product of the time, and I was as clued in and tuned in to those books. I think I could have been if I was doing them now. I would want to do them with somebody like you who's already tuned in who knows, and I would want the experience to be me discovering it afresh with somebody like me, and it seems to me like that would be someone like you. So somebody who's in that world who could sort of walk me through it because I'm sure that there are lots of new and exciting artists and photographers now. Who if, if, if cotton, which is now well back, so we want to do a new book, I would probably say go and see Abby. She knows, she knows her opinions on this. But if they wanted me to publish it with with somebody that I mean, that's what I would do, because it's like, honest to goodness, I'm not in this world anymore. It's like my world right now is fringe theatre, and events, Current Affairs events. So I absolutely champion this world. I think it's, I think it's very valid and important. But I'm no expert right now. So yeah, it's hard to say if I went back to do them again, I probably fight a bit harder, versus those kind of more sort of challenging works. But I fought pretty hard at the time. I kind of don't, I don't really know, it's, it's really, I can't really answer that question, because I'm pretty sure I'd do the same again. Now.