7 February 1962
Nigel Atherton looks back at past AP issues
JUDGING from the AP archive three of the biggest obsessions of amateur photographers back in the sixties were children, animals, and ladies taking their clothes off, and this issue from 60 years ago ticked every box. The challenge, as always, was trying to come up with new and original ways to illustrate these same topics and sometimes this meant thinking outside the box. Or the matchbox, in the case of Rayment Kirby’s 5-page lead feature this week, in which a nude model cavorts with a bunch of giant matchsticks in a series of surreal pictures. Or perhaps the matchsticks are normal size and it’s a very tiny woman? Who knows! It’s unclear whether any drugs were consumed in the making of this feature (well, it was the sixties) but the results were certainly eye-catching. Kirby shot the nude studies of the uncredited model on 6x6 transparency film, and then backlit and rephotographed the film frames with the matchsticks suspended above them on a sheet of glass. But in one image the model is actually holding one of the matchsticks – how did Rayment do that? Ah, glad you asked. He had the model pose with a couple of full-size lengths of timber, so they would look like matchsticks in the finished comp. Clever, eh? For one of the other images he inserted cut-up pieces of transparencies into partially opened matchboxes and re-photographed them on a lightbox. All the while he was probably wishing someone would hurry up and invent Photoshop. Note: In today’s more health-andsafety-conscious times it’s probably worth stating that we don’t recommend handling sawn timber in the nude.