A New Dimension

The person who would challenge and push the boundaries of what is considered 'decent' by the mores of the day had best not hope to live too long afterwards lest they are disappointed when someone else, following their example, pushes those boundaries further to the point where even the first challenger considers the situation 'indecent'.

Thus was the case for the remarkable Horace Roye-Narbeth (1906 - 2002), better known simply as Roye.

As his London Times obituary noted:

As a noted photographer of nudes, he successfully contested the prudish obscenity laws of his day, paving the way for others to publish work that Roye himself considered to be pornographic.

Featured for your enjoyment on this Saucy Saturday is No.6 in the Roye-Vala Stereo-Glamour Series. Purchased by Nick at the annual Gold Coast Antiques Fair some years ago for $AU15, it's probably 'about its money', as David Dickinson would say, although this edition's cover is somewhat scuffed and further marred by damage apparently from a later price sticker placed over the original cover price of 3/- (that's shillings to you).

No.3 in this series is the really collectable one, featuring British glamour model and actress Diana Dors, which currently asks between GBP50 and GBP99 on eBay.

The Stereo-Glamour Series series appears to have been published in the late 1940s or early '50s (probably the latter). If anyone can clear up the publication date, we'd be grateful.

The booklets appear to use a different method to the standard double exposure 3D photo set-up (which uses 2 images taken from slightly different angles) and, frankly, it doesn't work that well. Perhaps that's why the studio offered a more traditional stereoscope viewer and photo sets on the final page.

The inside back cover features a die-cut to keep your handheld 3D glasses - or rather 'Roye-Vala-Scope' - safe from loss, although spares are available for 6d each, post free, from the discreetly named Camera Studies Club.

Despite being 24 pages plus cover, edition No.6 features only eight pages of 3D nudes with each facing page blank, but the appreciator of the female form was nonetheless compensated with numerous other photos scattered throughout the publication and several pages of illustrated advertisements for other publications.

Noteworthy of this edition is it includes a photo from the 'Tarot' session, an original shot from which is featured on the painfully arty Roye Retrospective web site. However, where the Stereo-Glamour Series 3D photo has been strategically airbrushed, the photo on the Retrospective site includes the model's, ahem, 'landing strip' pubic hair.

Earlier refusal to self-censor landed Roye in court:

Roye, who claimed to have seen more than 10,000 naked women through the lens, always helped the police when they were investigating obscene pictures, but he was himself prosecuted when he refused to airbrush out pubic hair - the convention of the time - from the image of a model called Desiree in his Unique Edition collection. He successfully defended himself in court, arguing that the representation of beauty should be untrammelled by prudery.

The British photographer's life - and death - contained more drama than 10,000 nudes and a day in the Old Bailey, however.

Fired from his job as trainee draper for 'going to work in his evening suit after a drunken night on the tiles' he left London for South Africa - and was later expelled from the country for diamond smuggling.

By 1938, he was back in London with his own studio and about to create controversy with Tomorrow's Crucifixion, a photo of nude woman in a gasmask crucified. The Retrospective site describes the reaction:

This startling picture was published in the North London Recorder in August 1938 to a predictably mixed response. Those who might have reacted with outrage in normal circumstances were forced to concede that Roye's photograph summed up the threat of Nazi chemical warfare better than any run-of-the-mill propaganda shot taken before or during the Munich Crisis. Roye had taken a bet of £100 with the proprietor of the newspaper: could Roye create an image that would result in the paper being reprinted within hours of its publication? Tomorrow's Crucifixion, the best of a series of photos taken in a North London cinema after an all-night shoot, was the result. Roye won his bet, and also succeeded in creating what has now proved to be, on its rediscovery in the archive, one of the key pre-war photographic images of the century.

Roye retired to Portugal in 1959 but was forced to flee the country following the 1974 revolution because of his 'right-wing views and support for the dictatorship'.

A life punctuated by action came to a full stop in a dramatic manner. Roye had successfully defended his Lisbon villa against Leftists in the 1970s by brandishing a shotgun but he was murdered in Morocco in 2002, 'said to have been involved in a struggle with a painter who allegedly broke into his bedroom and stabbed him 14 times with the knife that Roye kept beneath his pillow'.

Robbery 'gone wrong' or a jealous husband? Who knows?