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The Day Salvador Dalí Took Over Playboy: The Most Surreal Photoshoot of 1973

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When the world's most eccentric artist met the world's most famous men's magazine, the result was something that couldn't have come from anyone else's imagination.


Collage featuring surreal, nude photoshoot with Salvador Dalí. Text reads: "The Day Salvador Dalí Took Over Playboy: The Most Surreal Photoshoot of 1973."

In the summer of 1973, Playboy magazine dispatched its longtime staff photographer Pompeo Posar and a full production crew to the sun-scorched coast of Catalonia with one extraordinary brief: hand total creative control to Salvador Dalí. What followed was arguably the strangest, most visually arresting photoshoot in the magazine's history, a collision of Surrealism and centrefold culture that still turns heads more than fifty years later.


Arriving at the Master's Door

Playboy sent Posar and his staff to Dalí's Mediterranean villa in Port Lligat, the small Spanish village sitting on a bay near the seaside town of Cadaqués. Port Lligat had been Dalí's home base since he and his wife and muse Gala returned there in 1948, and the village's dramatic coastline, raw rock, glittering water, sparse fishing boats, had fed his visual imagination for decades. He'd gradually bought up all the surrounding houses and transformed the property into a grand villa, making it his creative headquarters for the next three decades.


Salvador Dali outdoors with a large snake wrapped around a woman by a white structure. Trees and dry ground set the background.

When Posar arrived, he was greeted by Dalí seated on a throne beside the pool, extending his hand and shouting "Butterfly! Butterfly!" It was a suitably theatrical welcome from a man who once declared, "I myself am Surrealism." The sleepy village was turned upside down by the production, and local Dalí devotees gathered outside the villa to pay homage, chanting "Master! Master!" whenever he stepped outside to work under the blistering Spanish sun. Even by Dalí's standards for spectacle, it was quite an entrance.


The Man Behind the Lens

Pompeo Posar was an Italian-born photographer best known for his long career as a Playboy staff photographer, where he captured 65 Playmate centrefolds and 40 covers, establishing himself as one of the publication's most prolific and respected contributors. After immigrating to the United States in 1954, Posar met Hugh Hefner in 1960 through a Chicago television show, which led directly to his hiring by the magazine and the start of a decades-long association that took him around the world. His sensitivity to light, favouring soft natural illumination over harsh studio setups, made him an ideal match for a shoot conducted entirely outdoors under the Catalan sky.


Surreal image of a woman entwined by a snake in front of a giant egg. Disembodied hands reach from above. A stone head is in the background.

Preliminary Sketches and a Surrealist Vision

Dalí didn't show up with a vague idea and a moustache. He arrived with a plan. Working closely with Posar, Dalí created detailed preliminary sketches of his vision for the shoot, which ultimately incorporated a giant egg, an equally fake but impressively large snake, various collage images ranging from a Coca-Cola bottle to Renaissance-style architecture, and of course the Playboy Bunnies themselves, wearing little to nothing.



The imagery wasn't chosen at random. The egg in particular was one of Dalí's most loaded and recurring symbols. Early in his career, eggs commonly symbolised hope and love, while later works used the egg as a Christian symbol of purity and perfection. Art historians suggest that Dalí's egg motifs represent in-utero images of hope, but also the difficult contrast between the soft interior of eggs and the hard exterior, a metaphor for the difficulties humans face in their interactions with the universe. The snake wound beneath and around the egg added a layer of classical tension, evoking the Garden of Eden, ancient mythology, and the kind of psychosexual undercurrent that was always close to the surface of Dalí's work.


An egg with a playboy logo on it with naked women draped over it for a Salvador Dali shoot.

The collage references to Renaissance architecture weren't accidental either. Dalí had long used the classical tradition as a framework against which to shatter expectation, and the juxtaposition of old-world iconography with nude models in a magazine known for its centrefolds was precisely the kind of high-low collision he relished.


The Shoot Itself

Residents of Cadaqués watched the artist's every move from the hills surrounding the location as he ran the shoot with the authority of a man entirely at home in the role of director. Under his direction, the Playboy Bunnies found themselves draped across a giant egg tethered with a huge snake under the scorching Spanish sun.


Dalí created sketches before the shoot.
Dalí created sketches before the shoot.

The shoot was physically demanding and logistically chaotic, but Dalí thrived in those conditions. His working method, what he called the "paranoiac-critical method," involved deliberately inducing an irrational state to unlock imagery from the subconscious, and the disorder of a full production crew, adoring fans, and semi-nude models in 30-degree heat was arguably perfect for it.


Playboy had already featured photographers of the calibre of Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton, and had collaborated with artists including Keith Haring. But Dalí's involvement was different in kind, not just degree. He wasn't shooting the magazine's models; he was conscripting them into his own personal visual universe.


Playboy models with a giant egg

The Quote That Said Everything

When Playboy asked Dalí to reflect on the collaboration, his answer was gloriously, characteristically Dalínian:

"The meaning of my work is the motivation that is of the purest, money. What I did for Playboy is very good and your payment is equal to the task."

It's a quote that works on several levels at once. On the surface it's a deflation of artistic pretension, a blunt admission that even surrealist masters need to pay the bills. But it's also a sly piece of performance. Dalí was absolutely aware that the quote would be read, repeated and shared, and that its very brazenness would become part of the mythology of the shoot. The man who told the world "every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí" was never going to give a boring answer to a magazine interview.


Dalí with glasses, wearing an embroidered navy shirt, sketches in a notebook outdoors, holding a curved cane. Calm and focused mood.
Dalí sketching during the shoot.

The Legacy Collection

The finished photographs appeared in the December 1974 issue of Playboy, held back for over a year after the shoot itself took place. The prints were later included in the original Playboy Legacy Collection of 48 centrefold images, hand-selected by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and International Images CEO Norman Solomon for their iconic place in the magazine's history, and produced in 2007. The collection spans the entire history of the magazine from its 1953 launch, and the fact that the Dalí images made the cut among those 48 says everything about how the collaboration was regarded within Playboy's own canon.


Part of the Playboy and Dalí shoot. Three nude figures leap toward a surreal sky with a floating chair, architectural elements, and a moon. Vibrant colors enhance dreamlike scene. Surreal collage with swan, nude figures, archways, and Coke bottle. Dreamlike setting with muted colors, water, and abstract elements.

Posar himself died on April 5, 2004, but his body of work, including those sun-soaked Catalan photographs, remains a high point of glamour photography from the era. He was known simply as "the Master" among colleagues at Playboy, an echo, perhaps intentional, of what the fans outside Dalí's villa had been chanting all those years before.



Why It Still Matters

The 1973 Playboy shoot sits at an unusual crossroads in 20th-century culture. It's simultaneously a piece of commercial work (Dalí said so himself) and a genuinely coherent artistic statement, one that extended the visual vocabulary he'd spent decades developing in paint and sculpture into an entirely new medium. The egg, the snake, the Renaissance references, the sun-bleached Spanish landscape: all of it is consistent with his wider body of work.


Part of the Playboy and Dalí shoot. Three nude figures leap toward a surreal sky with a floating chair, architectural elements, and a moon. Vibrant colors enhance dreamlike scene.

It also captures Cadaqués at a particular moment in time. The town, perched on the Costa Brava and accessible then by a single winding mountain road, was already beginning to attract artists and intellectuals drawn by Dalí's presence, but it still had the quality of a working fishing village that his fame both glamorised and quietly overwhelmed. The photographs are, among other things, a document of that place and that moment.


More than fifty years on, they remain exactly what Dalí promised: very good indeed.


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