As we grow to 1000 facebook followers, I thought it nice restate the purpose and scope of Vintage Sleaze with the new year. I wrote the following when starting the site a year ago. Thanks all! Share with friends!
Vintage Sleaze the daily blog continues to discover forgotten artists of the past and attract fans around the world. Colorful, funny and often touching, writer, collector (and Grammy™ nominee) Jim Linderman writes the text using the vintage cartoon gag and risque novelty collection of Victor Minx as a starting point for examinations into the sexy and sexist days of girlie magazines, gag digests, back page scams and sideshow midnight rambles. Early strippers, models, illustrators, artists, photographers, mob-connected publishers and amphetamine driven writers (many posing under pseudonyms) mingle together in an amazing orgy of the funny and often fetishistic follies of the fifties. Linderman is able to balance the line between the profane and the profound easily, as most backyard erotica of the time was tame compared to today. Tease and trash your ancestors refused to admit existed (but bought anyway.) From Tijuana Bibles and inept snapshot salesmen to party toys and risque postcards, the site shows it all with delicate and affectionate respect and humor. A entire generation of artistic smut was rightly eliminated by the women’s movement but there was a glimmer of merit in the dark corners. Linderman aims to find it and makes no apologies, and in fact many of the followers of his site are women. Like a reporter, he digs it up and shares without judging. He frequently receives mail from relatives of those he profiles and most seem happy to have had the work of their ancestors found again and appreciated. Vintage Sleaze runs daily until he runs out!
There is a Saturday night, Sunday morning logic to Linderman’s madness…his first project was the Grammy™ nominated Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography, a collection of antique photographs and gospel recordings of the religious ceremony (with Dust to Digital and the original photographs donated to a major museum) and Camera Club Girls which published over 100 never before seen hand-painted photographs of Bettie Page and her friends taken by previously unknown New York amateur photographer Rudolph Rossi. With a talent for finding the obscure and bringing it back, Vintage Sleaze shows the possibility of the blog as an art form while bringing attention to an entire generation of lost and neglected artists who worked in the underbelly of culture.
SEE ALSO NEW BOOK BY THE SAME AUTHOR!
Bettie Page (detail) Illustration by Eugene Bilbrew, 1957, from the published book "Virgin Co-ed" supposedly by "Paris Press" (a ruse) Collection Victor Minx
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