Photographer of the Week: J. C. Argetsinger

Los Angeles is where you’d go to be photographed by J. C. Argetsinger, though he does also shoot intermittently shoot in Florida and New York. His interests include dance and fitness photography,

but he’s primarily a portrait artist, which means he’s a whiz at capturing a subject on her good side.

Like many modern photographers, he’s also interested in retro equipment, and in particular the low-res effects that can be achieved through a Polaroid camera:

You won’t be surprised to know there’s a spanking picture in his portfolio. Time now to meet the models involved. Here’s Baxter:

Here’s Revecka:

Here they are together:

They met up again the day after Valentine’s Day in 2009,

which was perhaps better news for Baxter than Revecka!

If you are interested in J. C. Argetsinger’s work, please visit his website.

Spanking on the Bare Skin

It is a fact that many people find tattoos unsightly. It is also a fact that many people who like to tattoo themselves belong to subcultures that aren’t entirely hostile to spanking.

The level of tattiness may vary from a discreet little monogram on the rear end…

to more extensive coverage:

And since some tatty people seem to like spanking imagery, it’s only natural that some of them are also willing to wear it – even occasionally on the most pertinent place!

Spanking tattoos vary widely in quality and approach. Some draw overtly on the lexicon of fetish imagery:

Some offer distinctive designs:

Others draw on commonplace spanking images that are easily sourced online. (If you don’t already know the originals, click here, here, here and here to see them.)

The first and last ones, respectively Jesus spanking Bettie Page and Batman spanking Marcia Monroe (with her face blacked out), are of course designs for tattoos rather than executed work, which illustrates an earlier stage in the process of body decoration. You’ll need a tattoo artist, who will likely be able to show you some designs before you actually take the plunge and allow the needle to insert some subcutaneous ink.

Some of these artists are quite distinguished in their medium, like the Parisian Frédéric Agid,

or, in a very different mode of stylization, the Brazilian Alisson Palaoro:

But what’s the attraction of spanking, if it’s not supererogatory of me to ask? Could it just possibly have anything at all to do with how you get tattooed?

It’s an ever-so-slightly painful process, sometimes involving a tender spot.

and sometimes an undignified position:

With any luck the results will be spectacular.

But, to return to the point we started with, there are people who find tattoos unsightly. So if you pay an unauthorized visit to the tattoo parlor, then, as the saying goes,

woe be unto you!

Kiss Me Kate: 1979

We open in Louisiana, at Jennings High School, where Tim Couch spanks Kelly Shultz in a production that ran March 7 through 10:

To Florida next, to see the Players of Sarasota production that ran April 27 through May 9, and starred Hal Hunt and Cinda Goeken:

Now we go up to Canada, for a production by Central Alberta Theatre, starring Don Christianson and Amy Olthuis, seen here in rehearsal being directed by Diane Thomas:

It ran for six performances, May 3 through 12. And almost concurrently in Pittsburgh, KMK featured in an anthology of extracts from Broadway musicals from May 4 through 12. Here are Carl Berkowitz and Donna Dean:

Nebraska Repertory Theatre opened its season with a full production on June 22. Caron Buinis and Norm Brandenstein were Lilli and Fred:

I’m afraid there’s no photo of her being spanked, but the theater gave the scene its customary publicity prominence with the usual graphic:

Here’s the Lilli in the summer music production which ran July 26 through 28 at Western Illinois University:

And here she is being spanked:

The period between August 30 to September 3 saw three performances at Payson High School, Utah, with La Marr Nielson as Fred and Lora LeBaron as Lilli, seen here in what the local paper described as a ‘tender’ scene.

The reporter was, of course, being ironical – unless he was referring to poor Lora’s rear end!

In October, Torquay Operatic Society produced the musical, and David Shaw spanked Joan Kerslake:

And according to the local paper, the production was… ‘a smacker’!

That’s it for 1979 – 1980, here we come!

Photographer of the Week: Christina Ramsey

In 2010, the photographer and rock drummer Christina Ramsey, seen here channeling her inner Daisy Mae, founded Howdy Girl Studios in her native Orlando. She built the business on her love of vintage imagery, aiming to bring out what she calls ‘vintage beauty’ in her clients. We can illustrate that with four of the clients in question, through her lenses and others. All of them will become relevant to our particular interest.

Here’s Ria Fredericks:

Heels Angel, sporting three different hair colors and at least two different panty colors:

Bonnie Belvedere:

And finally, Bad Lisa Anne:

But before we see them go to work on each other, let’s take a look at something Howdy Girl ran for a charity event in 2014: a kissing and spanking booth, staffed by pinup girls!

Now obviously one of those things is a bit more interesting to watch than the other…

even though it isn’t actually spanking in the strictest sense of the word.

Don’t worry, though, because Christina is enough of a vintage enthusiast to know what a real spanking looks like. Here’s Bad Lisa Anne demonstrating on Heels Angel:

But if Heels is an Angel, why is she the one being spanked? And by Bad Lisa, of all people! So maybe some turnabout is in order, even though Heels can’t now sit down to do it properly:

Bonnie and Ria are next up, but this time the spanking equation only goes one way, from Ria’s palm to Bonnie’s bottom:

Howdy Girl Studios came to an end in 2016 when Christina moved to Austin, and since then she seems to have concentrated more on her drumming than her photography, so sadly there’s no longer a website for you to visit if you’re interested. But it was fun while it lasted!

Another Spanking Rapper

I’m not altogether sure what the Vietnamese rapper Huynh James intended when he got together with photographer Quan Fam and a young lady for a session in 2016.

Was he planning to promote one of his songs, released through Mondo Records?

Or a mix tape he was going to offer his admiring fans?

Or his business, a hair salon in Phan Thiet?

But in any event, the key image ended up on the song!

And if you like rap, you can listen to his music on the Mondo Records YouTube channel.

There isn’t a Spanking Scene in… Two for the Seesaw

New York, 1958: two lonely people falter into one another’s orbit and end up sleeping together. It’s rather like Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, only with less damaged individuals. He’s Jerry Ryan, an attorney from Nebraska on the run from an on-off divorce. She’s Gittel Mosca, a Jewish seamstress from the Bronx who kids herself that she might have a career as a dancer. There’s a strong sexual attraction between them, which he articulates by wittily calling her ‘buoyant in the bow, swivelly in the stern and spicy in the hatch. I think you’re a mixed-up girl: calmly considered, your bottom is tops.’ They stay together for eight months before it becomes clear that the relationship is going nowhere: like the occupants of a seesaw, they are mutually interdependent but destined never to be perfectly aligned, one always up when the other is down and vice versa.

William Gibson’s bittersweet comedy Two for the Seesaw was a Broadway hit when it opened in January 1958 with Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft; it ran for 750 performances at the Booth Theatre, closing at the end of October 1959, and was then filmed in 1962 with Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine.

But this is a play without a spanking scene: the closest it gets is a moment in the second act when they have an argument about her promiscuity, and he hits her in the face with a rolled-up newspaper. So none of this history is directly relevant to our subject, except in establishing that it was a popular success ripe for revival beyond Broadway. And with that, we turn our attention to the production that graced the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts for six performances in August 1960. Leland Starnes played Jerry, and Gittel was the young Suzanne Pleshette.

And, happily, it looks as if the director decided she should have something better than a smack in the face…

Photographer of the Week: Eugenio Qose

Arresting imagery is every advertising and fashion photographer’s objective.

And arresting imagery is exactly what you get from the lens of Albanian-born Eugenio Qose, who is now based in Florence and shoots internationally.

A strong eye for line, developed through study of the master-painters of the Italian Renaissance, means he often poses his models with a striking angularity of limb:

which is often combined with curves in the appropriate places.

Look at how the lines of this stunning bridal gown spread out gloriously across the lower half of the picture:

When appropriate, his photos can also be gently but overtly erotic, whether the shoot is imaginatively off-the-wall or beautiful in its simplicity.

And the arresting image that earns him a place in this series is from a 2015 Miami Beach shoot for the Florida fashion house Casa de Novelas, featuring its founder, Daniel Novela, and a friend:

If you are interested in Eugenio Qose’s work, please visit his website.