Playboy - The Celebrities - 2006

The enduring success story of Hugh Hefner's Playboy, which after half a century remains unbroken, has not only to do with the interesting interviews that are so often referenced. It is, of course, not only that, but above all the photos — to put it plainly: the photos of naked women. Of course one can also find such images in a variety of other, more or less erotic glossy publications. And in some of these magazines you will surely find artistically demanding shots by renowned photographers that are hardly inferior to those in Playboy. But no one has managed to get nearly as many stars to pose for them completely naked or in scanty attire in erotic poses as Playboy. If you want to know why, you will find the answer in this magnificently equipped volume, which, based on these very images of prominent contemporaries, looks back on five decades of Playboy. It began with a bang: the first Playboy showed — in the fifties! — the naked Marilyn Monroe, writhing in a seductive pose on a red sheet. Hefner had the issue published in December 1953 without a date, because he himself harbored the greatest doubts about whether there would actually be a second issue. But the photograph taken by Tom Kelly in 1949 came, culturally speaking, as Hugh Hefner summarizes in his foreword, at the right moment. "Even if she didn’t intend it, Marilyn revolutionized the nation’s attitude toward nudity and self-promotion. She proved, as the first actress, that posing naked for Playboy can boost a career and does not necessarily mean the end of it." And since then numerous stars have posed for the magazine’s photographers (among others: John Derek, Herb Ritts, David LaChapelle, Richard Fegley): Anita Ekberg (1956) or 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 also posed for Playboy first and then became famous, like Cindy Crawford (1988) or Pamela Anderson (1991, 1992, 1994). A successful retrospective