Playboy - The Celebrities - 2006

The still unbroken success story of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy, even after half a century, has not only to do with the interesting interviews that are so often cited. It is of course not only, but above all the photos -- to put it simply: the photos of naked women. Of course, you can also find such images in various other glossy publications, more or less erotic. And in some of these magazines you will certainly find artistically sophisticated shots by renowned photographers that are hardly inferior to those in Playboy. But no one has managed to coax so many stars to pose completely naked or in scanty outfits in erotic poses for them as Playboy. If you want to know why that is, you will find the answer in this richly appointed volume, which looks back over five decades of Playboy with these very photographs of prominent contemporaries. It began with a bang: the first Playboy showed -- in the fifties! -- the naked Marilyn Monroe, posing seductively on a red sheet. Hefner published the issue in December 1953 without a date, because he himself had grave doubts whether there would actually be a second issue. Yet the image taken by Tom Kelly in 1949 arrived, culturally speaking, at the right moment, as Hugh Hefner summarizes in his preface. “Even though she didn’t mean to, Marilyn revolutionized the country’s attitude toward nudity and self-promotion. She proved, as the first actress, that posing nude for the Playboy could boost a career and not necessarily spell its end.” And since then numerous stars have undressed for the magazine’s photographers (among others: John Derek, Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, Richard Fegley): Anita Ekberg (1956) and Ursula Andress (1965) as well as Melanie Griffith (1976), Raquel Welch (1979), Bo Derek (1980), Kim Basinger (1983), Madonna (1985), Brigitte Nielsen (1987), Farrah Fawcett (1995), Nancy Sinatra (1995), Naomi Campbell (1999) or Anna Nicole Smith (2001), to name just a few of the celebrities gathered here. Some have undressed for Playboy first and then became famous, like Cindy Crawford (1988) or Pamela Anderson (1991, 1992, 1994). A successful retrospective