And it is Rob C whit his work who can spice up a bit......
I think there is possibly some misunderstanding about what my work, actually, was about.
To cut a longish story down to its essentials: my first love was fashion photography, and for some years it was a good furrow to plough. Came the fuel crisis of the early mid-70s and a lot of work stopped, principally because some clients were getting helpful funding from the fibres companies such as Monsanto, as well as from the International Wool Secretariat (IWS) that would once be highly visible via its famous Woolmark logo in almost every edition of the leading women's magazines. That funding cut due to fuel crisis caution in those suppliers, a lot of firms simply didn't have the available funds of their own to spend on exotic location advertising and, worse and coincidentally, London-based PR companies stretched northwards right into Scotland, where they were able to offer photography deals I simply couldn't match: far cheaper to send a box of clothes to a PR company in London and have it feed that into the schedule of a large studio in London doing a production line operation.
I read the scribbles on the wall, and having already designed and produced calendars for fashion firms I knew that production was where the money lay, not in being just a jobbing photographer.
With fashion dying, I turned to industrial clients for the continuation of my calendars, and that's where the girls came back in, but with fewer clothes. I never really did care all that much for so-called glamour photography beyond buying
Playboy which kinda educated my girlie eye, as it were, and even there, I generally thought the centrefolds the least attractive shot in each issue: too rigidly posed.
In the reality, I guess I just shot the topless girls in the same spirit as I did everything else, and that had an unwritten rule that if I wasn't willing to have my daughter see the pix, then they wouldn't be made.
So sex wasn't a priority; femininity and, hopefully, the approval of a female viewer confronted with my work mattered to me. Indeed, for one long-term client we shot and designed the physical calendars so that a bank manager recipient could display whichever illustration page he wanted to display depending on who was coming into his office. Political correctness in its early stages, then, but at an understandable and reasonable level.
Given a chance, I would far rather be shooting fashion in the manner of a Sarah Moon or Deborah Turbeville, than bare girls in the manner of any of the skin photographers. In the end, after the first five minutes the first time, glamour photography has all the excitement of making spaghetti. But it kept us alive.
Rob