Drawing on a panorama of materials from 1930s France, Eroticism and Photography in 1930s French Magazines takes a new approach to studying a certain type of image from a certain time.

Previously untapped by historians, magazines such as Paris Magazine, Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux, and Scandale are inscribed in the context of the interwar years. They reflect that context through a bawdy style, an audacious and multifaceted aesthetic – from kitsch to modern – and permeability to reproducibility. With a focus on the photographs as components of the magazines’ layout, Alix Agret critically examines their interrelations with texts and graphics without neglecting the history surrounding them, which forms a backdrop to the analyses of this previously unstudied source material. The first study of its kind, this is a timely scholarly contribution to the field of the history of photographs.

This book will be of interest to scholars in the field of history of photography, French history, and twentieth-century art history.