According to Andre de Dienes. the Hungarian-born lensman who produced the pictures on these pages, the loveliness of the women he shoots is beyond question. But to describe these photos as lovely would be a bit imprecise. "I can't really describe them at all." says De Dienes, "and I won't tell you how I shot them, because that's a secret I'd prefer to keep to myself. All I can say is that the technique I used is extremely complicated and that I practically ruined my eyes with the damn thing." Such hardships, however, aren't unusual for De Dienes. Over the past 35 years, he has braved Sahara heat, Florida hurricanes and hostile movie stars to shoot the kind of glamor and nude photography that has made him famous. Longtime Playboy readers will remember the Marilyn Monroe pictorials we featured over the years; De Dienes' shots of her were among the first we published. He has also compiled six books of nude photography and is busy shooting the seventh, an expanded version of the technique he's explored here. As a photographer, De Dienes has never been short on new approaches. He conceived his current one when a model showed up drunk at his studio. "I was furious," De Dienes recalls. "Her posing was weird, dreadful. When I developed the shooting, I was even more distressed, and out of spite I distorted her photos. Thereupon, I discovered a whole new way to photograph nudes." Though these images may share resonances with the Freudian-inspired symbolism of painters Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico, De Dienes denies that the work of such surrealists influences his own. "I don't think an artist should be influenced by anyone," he says. To him, these photographs evoke a carnivallike spirit more comical than anything else. For others, his distorting lens highlights the essential qualities of the female form. But it's not our task here to judge his work; whether you think these studies are funny, sexy and/or bizarre, we believe they do an admirable job of defining themselves.
