If I remember rightly, we wanted to create a magazine that guys would buy but their girlfriends would read and enjoy as well – a beautiful, funny, envelope-pushing magazine which chimed with the times, without insulting the intelligence or aesthetics of anyone reasonably open-minded. At the beginning we were going around London talking up a storm about ‘reinventing pornography’ – oh, the folly of youth. “It was 1997, the Tories had finally lost their grip on the reins of power and Jarvis had just bum-rushed Michael Jackson at the Brits, so we were pretty optimistic that anything was possible. We always knew the magazine may lose their shit when they saw a model who had a boyish figure and not that typical porn body, but that for me was the thing that made it what it was – it was about her energy and personality, and at the end of the day that made those pictures so special.” There’s a timeless quality to the images and Rose looks gorgeous but has this edge. It holds a special place in my heart as there are so many funny memories, the pictures turned out just how we had hoped. I love the shoot, it’s one of my favourites. It was so funny that it all just fell into place and happened quite naturally. The styling was really simple so it looked natural not staged – some vintage flower swimming trunks or some Levi jeans, some friendship bands around her wrist. I remember Rose felt awkward so I made everyone there – Corinne, Neil, myself and Andy – strip down to our underwear. We stayed in a little cottage and the surroundings were beautiful. The only difference (with this shoot) was instead of putting Rose in an outfit we wanted her topless. We decided to go to Wales and got our friend Andy Frank the lead singer of the band Pusherman to drive us up. “I remember Rose felt awkward so I made everyone there strip down to our underwear” – Tara St Hill Rosemary Ferguson was perfect – stunningly beautiful, with an amazing presence and the perfect body for what we wanted. Some of the images were quite stunning, not just girls in tacky underwear with their legs open or grabbing at their boobs – the light was soft, the pictures artistic. We decided to pay homage to that era and wanted to shoot a girl in a rapeseed field topless, but to put a spin on it we decided we wanted the girl to have a boyish figure. We looked back to the Penthouse magazines of the 60s and 70s. We relished the idea of the project and were bouncing ideas around straight away. “Porn in those days had become tacky and a bit of a joke – it wasn’t the soft focus images of the 70s we remembered, it felt harder and a little soulless. Corinne had met the editor of Penthouse at a Vivienne Westwood party, and came home very excited telling me they had asked her to shoot for the magazine. Here, Olley, stylist Tara St Hill and hairstylist Neil Moodie revisit the series, shot over a weekend in the Welsh countryside. At its helm was Michelle Olley of Skin Two, a staple of London’s fetish press, who had been brought on board to “make porn cool” – applying the style of publications like The Face to Penthouse’s tired top shelf aesthetic.ĭespite Olley’s own good intentions, the newly revamped Penthouse didn’t last long (it ran until late 1998, while Olley herself left after four months), but it’s partly that sense of the short-lived which makes these unearthed images – the first of two shoots by Day for the magazine – so special. They emerged from a moment of late 90s optimism, a determination to reclaim the masculine gaze of pornography and reconcile it with art, beauty and the energy of London at the time. But so it was that in 1997 the renowned photographer (whose raw style blended the worlds of fashion and documentary, and would come to define an entire era of British image-making until her death in 2010) accepted a job shooting for a newly-revamped version of the soft-core mag. Penthouse and Corinne Day are two names you don’t expect to find in the same sentence.
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