Gallery
Nothing makes a woman seem more naked than standing au naturelle wearing an antique hairdo. Almost all of California photographer Albert Arthur Allen’s women have bobbed coiffures — short hair marked with art deco swirls. He was a refugee of a wealthy New England family, as well as the victim of a San Francisco motorcycle accident that left him a hunched-over gimp. That said, from 1915 to 1930, Allen compelled hundreds of California girls to drop their knickers and pose naked. He was not shooting dirty pictures. He believed sex appeal was “human appeal.” He also believed “the true nude gives a version of beauty, both physical and spiritual — two great needs of humanity.”
Allen was a seer who thought his photos would inspire a kind of paradoxical chaste lust and reveal the potential of all naked women to become icons. His first series of nudes was of girls posing along the Pacific Coast or among nearby timber. Then Allen put his nude beauties in bourgeois or fake Moorish interiors: a naked dame musing at her piano. Or in her bath. Or inside the confines of her harem tent. Allen’s inadvertent masterpiece is a choreographed extravaganza of a dozen dancing naked women, a vision that predates Busby Berkley by a good 10 years.
I suspect in the 1920s, Allen girls would have been considered slender enough. Not that I have any proof. Nude photography was almost always illegal in the 1920s, so there is not an abundance of photographic evidence. As it was, Allen bore the wrath of San Francisco bluenoses more than once during the ’20s and was hauled before a judge because of his photos.
The lengthy introduction to the book establishes how Allen’s work fits into the nude aesthetics of the time, although his biography is a trifle dull. Not only are solid facts about Allen hard to come by, his self-penned biographical information is riddled with lies and misinformation. We do know Allen was born on May 8, 1886, near Grafton, Mass. His family was loaded with shipbuilding money — indeed, Mom and Pop seem to have supported their wayward son for most of the teens and ’20s.
In a way Allen saw his work as a great democratic project. “To see womankind entirely nude would place all women on equality,” he wrote. “And it would be only their true mental and physical charm that would lift them from the ordinary.” In 1925, Allen lifted women from the ordinary by putting them into groups and having them perform nude choreography and military drills.
