This article originally appeared on VICE Italy.
Massimo Russo is an art collector and the curator of the Ginger & Glamour exhibition at the Fish & Chips International Erotic Film Festival in Turin. The showcase is a celebration of iconic adult film posters – many of which are from Russo’s personal collection.
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“I bought my first poster 20 years ago in Turin’s Balon antiques market,” Russo told me at the festival. “From there I started buying from dealers in the US, Japan, France, Sweden and Spain. I always knew that these posters could come together one day to form a unique exhibition.” As a collective, Russo hopes the posters will show how the industry has developed in the past few decades. “In the 1980s, as porn became more mainstream, photographs came to replace illustrations, which were real works of art – especially the ones made in Italy, like those of Sandro Symeoni.”
Russo took the title of the exhibition from the name of the production company that created one of his favourite posters. “I chose ‘Ginger & Glamour’ because it seemed to summarise the strong, spicy, flamboyant era that it came from,” he explained. “The company were the ones who brought the film Deep Throat to Italy,” – a reference to the 1972 cult classic.
As the exhibition’s promotional text explains, Russo has picked posters “that are saucy but rarely explicit”. That’s why the showcase also includes materials from regular films, such as Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita. The text goes on to explain: “Although they may not seem particularly provocative or daring to us viewers today, they should be appreciated in the context of the times in which they were created.”
Scroll down to see more posters from Massimo Russo’s Ginger and Glamour.
