Bunny's Honeys: Bunny Yeager, Queen of Pin-up Photography.

This is about you and me, but it's more about him. The penis, you see, didn't really exist. Tucked away, out of sight out of mind, the never modest organ didn't make an appearance until at least 1980. In 1973 my father was writing about cars for Swank, a second-tier girlie magazine with slightly more spread in their spreads and less pretense about being there. Swank was where it was at and out and about in my neighborhood. Billy, Chris, and Chuck, privileged friends of my brother, would sneak up to my father's third-floor office to cast their eves on the lovely site of Tammy, Miss Whenever. whenever they wanted her, usually after school.

The beauty. of the Swank days was the amount of time one could spend with Tammy and the other women. Instead of perilously lifting ratty Playboys from underwear drawers, one found the stacks of Swank, duplicates of back issues, professionally stowed away alongside packs of pens and envelopes and issues of more respectable magazines like Muscle Car and Cars. Because my father wrote for Swank, the pictures didn't seem as dirty or forbidden. Billy who was bad Chris who was dumb, and Chuck who was unlucky, all blond, languished on piles of blue-pile carpet, resplendent in the bright sunlight that poured from an alcove window. Sealed with a kiss, they rolled until rug burned, bony knees akimbo. Scraggly boys deep in study.

I played strip poker on more than one occasion with this towheaded trio, but never joined them in their weekly porno raids. The glorious and always enrapt Tammy, with her swollen cantaloupe breasts and endless-summer hips, was a bizarre sight, better contemplated alone. This world of women posed like pairs of kittens at play on beds with crocheted spreads was a curiosity for me. Possessing no prominent organs, I became, in my own mind, neither sex; a boundlessly flat body waiting to mutate into an unfathomable three-dimensional shape.

Pornography is whatever it was the first time you saw it. For me, in 1973, it was Mel Ramos blondes wavy as surf, clean superstacked superheroines stashed away in my father's tidy domain. My own relatively carefree nostalgia is echoed in ex-model and photographer Bunny Yeager's vivacious pinup portraits from the Sos and '60s. Billed as one of the world's "most beautiful photographers" (she notes that the competition wasn't stiff, as she and Harriett Shepard were the only women photographers in the business) by U.S. Camera in 1953, Yeager has been the subject or author of some 18 books. This glossy coffee table item, which brings porn pictures, out of the closet, is filled with breezy unpornographic recollections of each model. "Young and enthusiastic Marci Lane was a fresh and wholesome looking subject for me to shoot, and was always ready to explore new posing ideas." I won't tell you more about Bunny's girls, her hopped-up honeys in awkward homemade poses, forever smiling the innocent smile of the times. Either you'll recognize them or you won't, depending on how you stole your first peek at the creamy, often pale-pink flesh that lay between the page and your finger.

Collier Schorr is an artist and writer and the U.S. editor of Frieze magazine.