Centrefold Venus of the Month 20: Jeanne, January 1977

Agent Triple P has had a request for a centrefold from the seventies from a magazine outside the big two.  So here, from January 1977's Oui, is Jeanne.

Oui being a clone of Penthouse it was less concerned about presenting accurate details of its centrefolds so we end up with a nonsensical story about a dancer moving from Chicago to California and then to Colorado...etc.etc etc.

One thing chimes; and that is the reference to Colorado for, despite his continental sounding name and the fact that Oui used many European photographers (due to their arrangement with France's Lui magazine) the photographer was American.

Nicholas DeSciose is a successful Denver-based photographer who got his first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, at the age of eight.  He took some well known pictures of the Beatles, Rolling Stones and others in the sixties.

DeSciose in the studio thirty years ago

Today he runs a studio in Denver and is a very active photographer working in sports, commercial, editorial, fashion and art photography.

These days apart from his photography he  is also a film cameraman and director and, as such, has won three Emmy awards.

DeSciose was also, from a young age, a nude art model so maybe had rather more in common with his subjects than some photographers. 

Playboy Playmate Moniqe St Pierre poses for DeSciose for Lange ski boots in 1980

Apart from his work in Oui he also shot one Playboy centrefold, Denise McConnell (March 1979).

Oui had always been conceived as a racier version of Playboy and so was able to continue with pussy shots when Playboy's advertisers were asking them to  reverse their earlier explicitness.

DeSciose has gone for a very grainy look and murky lighting for his pictures of Jeanne  which give them a nicely voyeuristic and reportage look rather than the polished perfection seen in Playboy at the time.

Given that it was the mid seventies there was the requirement for the inevitable faux masturbation shots.

DeSciose handles the issue with a series of four shots featuring Jeanne and a telephone.

Without being explicit he manages a sensual quartet of pictures as Jeanne, perhaps, prepares for an erotic phone conversation.

So we like DeSciose's approach to the lovely Jeanne.  It just demonstrates that in the seventies there were some top photographers experimenting with all sorts of approaches to photographing women for mens magazines.  Today, sadly, the over-lit, over Photoshopped, digitally originated pictures of silicone enhanced women who have not a trace of body hair are uniformly dull in comparison.