photographer ron vogel has been snapping pictures of his daughter ever since she was a baby, at 21, she's still his favorite model
Longtime readers of Playboy will no doubt be familiar with the name Ron Vogel. Between the years 1958 and 1968, Ron shot ten centerfolds for this magazine, five of which are reproduced in miniature on the opposite page: Shortly after he began shooting for Playboy, Ron and his wife, Audry, had a child whom they named Alexis, and what with all the naked ladies posing in Ron's studio day after day, it was only natural that little Alexis would develop a certain affinity for the camera. "Once," Audry recalls, "when Ron was shooting a Playmate, Lexi came into the living room and said, 'You can shoot me now, Daddy." She was three at the time and she had nothing on, just long red curls down her back. She just decided she was going to be shot in the nude, too. She had the cutest little tush." And so it began. Over the years, Ron has, in his own words, "taken hundreds of pictures of Lexi in various states of undress. She has youth and vitality greater than most of the models I've worked with and her coloring is extraordinary, to say the least; she has earthy tones and dark, sort of penetrating eyes." For Lexi, posing for her father was a way of getting his attention. "I was a little ham," she recalls. "I'd try to get my dad's attention away from his models. The models thought it was cute!" Even as she grew older and developed into a woman, Lexi didn't pick up any inhibitions about posing in the raw. "It's always been very casual around here," she says. "We've always been a nudist family, so I never had any problems posing that way for my father." Audry, who claims to be the only woman in the country who runs a photo agency that deals exclusively in nude photography, concurs. "I've been involved wiih nudity all my life; nudity is beauty." Even today, the family will occasionally visit a local nude beach, and Lexi, who is an accomplished equestrienne, sometimes rides nude. Which brings us to Lexi's other great passion in life--horses. Since the age of nine, she has been riding and training horses. At the ripe old age of 12, she won first place in the United States national bareback-riding championship competition and, since then, has won more than 200 other horsemanship titles. "I taught riding for years," she tells us. "A lot of my students have won championships. I stopped at 18 and got into retailing for a while, working in a department store, but I decided that just wasn't my cup of tea. Right now, I'm just beachcombing, you might say, but eventually I'd like to race and possibly buy some property and start raising horses." The idea of posing nude with one of her horses appealed to Lexi. "The result is sort of what you might call a Western pictorial," she says. "The horse in the pictures is named Santan. I own four altogether--Brandy, Sierra and Dapper are the names of the others. One's a registered Appaloosa, the three others are registered quarter horses." As for Lexi's other pastimes, one of her projects for the near future is to organize the many photos her father has taken of her. "You wouldn't believe all the pictures he's taken--boxes and boxes!" she says. "Someday soon, my mom and I are going to put together an album."
