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On August 13, 2004, a man named Bharat Kalicharan Yadav was brought to Courtroom No. 7 at the Nagpur District Court in Maharashtra, India, for a bail hearing. He'd been arrested less than a week earlier. Nobody who knew him expected this arrest to stick any more than the previous 14 had. He was known to everyone in Kasturba Nagar simply as Akku Yadav, and for 13 years the slum community there had lived under his terror. He walked in that morning with the same swagger he always had. He didn't walk out. Within 15 minutes, Akku Yadav had been stabbed more than 70 times, had chili powder thrown in his face and forced into his mouth, and had his penis severed with a kitchen knife. His killers were mostly women. Many of them were his victims. When police regained control of the courtroom and asked who was responsible, every woman in the room raised her hand. The Making of a Monster Akku Yadav was born in 1971 in Kasturba Nagar, a dense slum in central Nagpur. His father was a milkman. He left school after class 7. By his own community's account, author Swati Mehta later wrote in her book Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur, he had graduated from being a milkman's son to a local menace before he was old enough to shave. His first confirmed rape was in 1991, when he and his gang kidnapped a woman near an abandoned building they used as a base. She reported it to Jaripatka police station. Officers there were already receiving bribes from Yadav's extortion racket. They initially ignored her complaint. When a formal report was eventually filed and Yadav was arrested, the case never made it to court. After posting bail, he broke into the woman's home and beat both her and her husband. She never reported him again. As it turned out, this was the only rape he was ever formally reported to police for. Over the following 13 years, Yadav raped more than 40 women and girls, some as young as 10. He murdered at least three people. He extorted money and goods from daily-wage labourers, domestic workers, and small business owners throughout the slum. He'd arrive at homes at 4am, claim to be police, force his way in, stab husbands, lock them in bathrooms, and drag women away. He cut off a woman's ears for her earrings and her fingers when her rings wouldn't come off. He directed his gang to gang-rape a 12-year-old girl as a warning to her family. How He Kept Getting Away With It Yadav stayed free through a combination of corruption, intimidation, and caste politics. He bribed police officers with cash and alcohol. He tipped them off when he found out complaints had been filed against him. In one documented case, a woman who reported him was subsequently gang-raped by police officers at the station. A post-lynching survey found that 73 percent of Kasturba Nagar residents said they'd stopped filing complaints because they knew nothing would happen, and feared retaliation. Kasturba Nagar, Shahadara, New Delhi The local Jaripatka police were later found by a court to have been effectively in business with Yadav. He also had political protection: local politicians were among those who benefited from his network and helped shield him from sustained prosecution. Most residents of Kasturba Nagar were Dalit, from the lowest rungs of India's caste system. Their complaints carried little weight with officers who saw the slum as someone else's problem. He was arrested 14 times in total. Each time, bail was granted. He'd return to Kasturba Nagar and pick up where he'd left off. Sometimes he'd specifically target whoever had reported him. After one arrest, he was released on the grounds of good behaviour. After another, he walked free because witnesses were too frightened to testify. The Murder of Asha Bhagat The most significant of Yadav's murders, in terms of what it set in motion, was that of Asha Bhagat in 1999. Bhagat ran a small alcohol business in the slum and was one of the very few people in Kasturba Nagar who wasn't afraid of him. When Yadav began extorting money from her customers and assaulting women in her orbit, she organised a group of men to attack him. They got him drunk and beat him. He survived. Yadav waited and then went to Bhagat's home. He slit her throat, cut off her ears and breasts, and stole her jewellery. He did all of this in front of her teenage daughter, Megha, who was so traumatised she couldn't testify against him in court. The case collapsed. Yadav walked free. Bhagat's sister, Resha Raut, later became one of the key figures in the events of August 2004. The scene inside the courtroom The Day the Women Walked to Court In early August 2004, a woman named Usha Narayane finally fought back openly against Yadav. After he and his gang threatened her, the community organised and burned down his house. Yadav went to police claiming he needed protection. Officers, perhaps calculating that he was becoming more trouble than he was worth, arrested him. His bail hearing was set for August 13. Word spread through Kasturba Nagar that he was going to be released again. Women didn't organise a formal protest. They simply started walking toward the courthouse, in ones and twos and then in groups, carrying the tools they had to hand: vegetable knives, stones, chili powder. Between 200 and 400 people gathered outside Courtroom No. 7. When Yadav was brought in, he was escorted by just two or three unarmed constables. He spotted a woman in the crowd he'd previously raped and called her a prostitute. She took off her sandal and hit him, shouting: 'We can't both live on this earth together. It's you or me.' The room erupted. Women surged forward, overpowering the constables. They threw chili powder in Yadav's face and at officers who tried to intervene. Within minutes he was on the floor. He begged for his life, reportedly crying: 'Forgive me! I won't do it again!' It made no difference. He was stabbed more than 70 times. His body was left in a pool of blood on the courtroom floor. Arrest Us All When police regained control, every woman in the room raised her hand. 'Arrest us all,' they said. The strategy was deliberate and effective: collective responsibility made it impossible to single out individuals. Five women, including Usha Narayane and Anjanabai Borkar, Asha Bhagat's mother, were eventually arrested on murder charges. Within days, 400 residents stormed the court demanding they be freed. More than 100 lawyers volunteered to defend the accused for free. Bail was granted amid public pressure. The women were unapologetic. They framed what they'd done explicitly as social justice and a form of the freedom struggle. Trade union leader V. Chandra publicly called the killing justified. The case became a flashpoint in India for debates about vigilantism, gender violence, caste, and the limits of a justice system that had utterly failed a community for over a decade. The Verdict, Ten Years Later The murder trial formally began in August 2012, eight years after the killing. Twenty-one people were charged, including 14 men and 7 women. Three died during the course of proceedings. The investigation was shambolic: key forensic evidence was never properly analysed, police officers who'd filed original reports contradicted themselves under cross-examination, and the court acknowledged that the local police had not just failed to protect victims but had in some cases actively assisted Yadav. In November 2014, the District and Sessions Court in Nagpur acquitted all 18 surviving accused on the grounds that there was no clinching evidence to prove individual guilt. The verdict was delivered in the same courtroom where Yadav had been killed a decade earlier. Nobody was ever punished. The Netflix docuseries Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom, released in 2022, brought the story to a global audience. Resha Raut, Asha Bhagat's sister, appears in it. So does Vilas Bhande, another accused who had been directly threatened by Yadav in the weeks before his death. The series frames the killing not as a descent into lawlessness but as what happens when a community is given no other option. It's hard to argue with that conclusion. Sources 1. The Print: Stabbed 70 times in court: why the women who killed Akku Yadav were hailed as heroes 2. Thar Tribune: Akku Yadav Was the Demon of Kasturba Nagar Until a Courtroom Mob Killed Him in 2004 3. Vice: How My Mother Took Revenge on My Sister's Murderer 4. India TV News: Nagpur courtroom death: When women gave a horrific end to serial rapist 5. Wonder Never Ends: Akku Yadav Court Killing: The Shocking Story of How 200 Women Delivered Justice 6. The Cinema Holic: Who Was Akku Yadav? Why Was He Murdered? 7. The News Dirt: How Nagpur's Women Took Justice Into Their Own Hands 8. NPR: Women Accused of Killing Man in India 9. Grokipedia: Akku Yadav 10. Mehta, Swati. Killing Justice: Vigilantism in Nagpur. 2005.

In 1957, Life magazine was planning a major multi-part series on crime in America. The editors wanted to examine rising criminal activity, public fear, and what they saw as a justice system struggling to keep up. For the opening instalment, they sent Gordon Parks. It was, in retrospect, either a very smart decision or an accidental one that turned out smarter than anyone intended. Parks spent six weeks riding with police, photographing drug raids, visiting prisons, and witnessing an execution. What he brought back was not what the editors were expecting. Who Was Gordon Parks? By 1957 Parks had already been at Life for nearly a decade, the first African American staff photographer in the magazine's history. He'd grown up in Kansas in poverty, was thrown out of his sister's house at 14 after their mother died, and spent years fending for himself before discovering photography at 25. He'd built his reputation documenting Black American life with a directness that no mainstream publication had attempted before, most famously his 1948 photo essay on Harlem gang leader Red Jackson, which ran in Life and caused a sensation. He was known for working in black and white. He was also known for bringing something to his subjects that most photojournalists of the era didn't bother with: actual empathy. When Life handed him the crime assignment, Parks later said his brief was simple: "Explore crime across America. A journey through hell." Six Weeks on the Road Parks travelled to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, accompanied by a Life reporter named Henry Suydam. He worked with police departments, hospitals, coroner's offices, and prisons, covering what he later described as the entire timeline of crime from the moment it was committed through to trial, incarceration, and execution. In Chicago, he rode with two detectives he described as ethically questionable, accompanying them on drug raids through tenement hallways. One of his best-known images from that period shows two white officers in a grimy corridor, one of them mid-kick against a door, gun drawn. Another shows a Black detective checking a young white man's arm for needle marks, a cigarette in his mouth. Parks photographed addicts preparing injections, suspects being hauled into stations, and crime scenes that hadn't been cleaned up yet. In San Francisco, he got access to San Quentin and witnessed the execution of convicted murderer Thomas L. Johnston in the gas chamber. He photographed the prison's panoptical architecture and the strange way inmates and officers moved through the same space while existing in entirely different realities. The most striking technical decision Parks made was to shoot the whole series in colour. This was unusual for him. His prior work was almost entirely black and white. But he chose muted, sombre tones rather than anything vivid or lurid, and the effect was to make the images feel more documentary and less sensational than the subject matter might have demanded. Critics would later note they prefigured the visual texture of 1970s American cinema. What Life Published, and What It Didn't Parks shot around 300 photographs across the six weeks. Life ran 12 of them across eight pages in the September 9, 1957 issue. The photographs weren't even credited to Parks by name in the original publication. The selection the editors made is telling. The only faces visible in the published images belong to white police officers. Every suspect, every person being searched or arrested or interrogated, appears as a shadowy or anonymous figure. Parks had photographed white criminals and Black police officers alongside everything else, but those images didn't make it into the magazine. What ran was a version of the story that fit comfortably within the expected narrative: law enforcement as the light, criminals as the dark. The accompanying article by Robert Wallace took a conventional approach, framing crime largely through the lens of public menace and police heroism. It made no attempt to examine why certain communities were policed differently to others, or what role race and class played in determining who got arrested, charged, and convicted. Parks's photographs, even in their edited form, quietly asked those questions. The text refused to answer them. What Parks Was Actually Doing The photographs Parks took that Life didn't run are where the real argument lives. In the full archive, Parks showed drug addicts without exposing their faces, protecting their identities while conveying the desperation of addiction. He photographed people being beaten by police alongside images of those same police officers looking bored or relaxed moments later. He documented the criminal justice system as a pipeline rather than a net, following individuals from the street through to imprisonment. He also made a point of not shooting in a way that confirmed existing stereotypes. His images of crime scenes were grim but not exploitative. His portraits of prisoners treated them as people rather than specimens. The distance between what Parks was doing and what Life wanted was significant, and the editorial decisions made in the magazine's offices reflected that gap clearly. The Long Afterlife of the Assignment The full scale of what Parks produced in 1957 wasn't visible to the public for decades. In 2020, MoMA acquired 56 prints from the series, and the Gordon Parks Foundation co-published a book with Steidl titled The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, which reproduced more than 90 images from the assignment, including around 50 that had never been published before. The book presented the series in its intended form rather than Life's edited version. The response made clear what had been lost in the original publication. Reviewers noted that Parks had essentially produced two things simultaneously: a record of American crime in 1957, and a critique of the system built to respond to it. Life had only published the first. Parks went on to direct Shaft in 1971, becoming the first Black director of a major Hollywood studio film. He continued to work as a photographer, writer, and composer until his death in 2006 at the age of 93. The 1957 crime assignment is now considered one of the defining works of his career, not because of the 12 photographs Life chose to run, but because of the 288 it didn't. Sources 1. The Gordon Parks Foundation: Crime, 1957 2. MoMA: Gordon Parks and The Atmosphere of Crime 3. Time: Reconsidering Gordon Parks Photographs Of Crime In the 1950s 4. Brooklyn Rail: Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 5. ArtBlart: Photographs: Gordon Parks The Atmosphere of Crime 1957 6. SFPL Magazines and Newspapers Center: Gordon Parks, Photographer for Life Magazine 7. Elle Walker (Substack): Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 8. Station Gossip: Police raids and urban crime of the 1950s 9. Wikipedia: Gordon Parks

On the evening of March 11, 1944, a neighbour on Rue Le Sueur in the 16th arrondissement of Paris called the police. Heavy black smoke had been pouring from the chimney of number 21 for five days straight. The stench was nauseating. The house appeared unoccupied, but someone had tacked a note to the door: 'Away for one month. Forward mail to Auxerre.' Police called the owner, Dr. Marcel Petiot, who lived across town. He promised to come right over with the keys. He never showed. When firefighters finally broke in, they found a coal stove in the basement burning at full intensity. Stuffed inside it, and scattered across the floor around it, were human remains. By the time police had finished searching the property, they'd recovered parts of at least 23 bodies. The real number of Petiot's victims is almost certainly far higher. Petiot's wedding A Doctor With a Suspicious History Petiot was born in Auxerre in 1897 and showed an unusual intelligence from early childhood, paired with an equally unusual disregard for rules. He was expelled from school multiple times, diagnosed as mentally unfit at 17, and arrested for mail theft before he'd finished his education. When he was drafted into the French infantry in 1916 he was wounded, gassed, and sent to various rest homes after exhibiting signs of mental breakdown. He was arrested for stealing army blankets, jailed in Orleans, and eventually diagnosed with enough psychiatric ailments to be returned to the front anyway. He was transferred again after shooting himself in the foot. A further diagnosis finally got him discharged with a disability pension. Despite all of this, he completed a medical degree from the University of Paris in 1921, finishing an accelerated programme intended for veterans, and set up practice in the small town of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. There, he was genuinely popular. He was elected mayor in 1926. He was also probably already killing people. His first suspected victim was Louise Delaveau, a woman he'd been having an affair with. She disappeared in May 1926. Neighbours told police they'd seen Petiot loading a trunk into his car. Police investigated and dismissed her as a runaway. That same year, he won the mayoral election by hiring an accomplice to disrupt his opponent's campaign debate. Once in office he embezzled from the town funds. He was removed as mayor in 1931 after a fraud conviction, then won election to the local council, then lost that seat after being caught stealing electricity from the village. He moved to Paris in 1933. In Paris, Petiot built a successful practice at 66 Rue Caumartin, attracting patients with credentials that were at least partly fabricated. In 1936 he was appointed medecin d'etat-civil, giving him official authority to write death certificates. That same year he was briefly institutionalised for kleptomania. He was fined for illegally prescribing narcotics in 1942, but the two addicts set to testify against him disappeared before the trial. The case was dropped. Marcel Petiot The Murder House on Rue Le Sueur In 1941, Petiot bought a three-storey townhouse at 21 Rue Le Sueur. He had it extensively renovated. The surrounding wall was raised so neighbours couldn't see into the courtyard. In the basement, workmen built a small triangular room to Petiot's exact specifications: thick walls, a single entrance with no doorknob on the inside, hooks embedded in the walls, and a peephole drilled through the door fitted with a telescopic viewing lens. The basement also had sinks large enough to drain a body of blood. The room had one purpose. Petiot would tell victims it was a secure hiding spot, lock them inside from the outside, then watch through the peephole while he pumped in poisonous gas. Once they were dead, he'd dispose of the remains. Early on, he dumped bodies in the Seine. When that became too cumbersome, he burned them in the stoves on the property. Fly-Tox and the Fake Escape Network Petiot's method for finding victims was as simple as it was cynical. He set up a fake escape network he called Fly-Tox, operating under the alias 'Dr. Eugene.' Three accomplices directed victims his way: a barber named Raoul Fourrier, who referred clients from his shop on Rue des Mathurins, along with Edmond Pintard and Rene-Gustave Nezondet. Petiot took anyone who could afford his fee of 25,000 francs per person, regardless of whether they were Jewish families fleeing persecution, Resistance fighters, or ordinary criminals who needed to disappear. He claimed he could arrange safe passage to Argentina or elsewhere in South America via Portugal, and that Argentine officials required inoculations before entry. When victims arrived at Rue Le Sueur carrying their most valuable possessions, as instructed, he injected them with cyanide under the guise of a vaccine and led them to the triangular room. He kept everything they'd brought. Police later recovered suitcases, clothing, jewellery and personal effects belonging to hundreds of people. Around 200 million francs in stolen money was never recovered. Caught, Released, Then Hidden in Plain Sight The Gestapo arrested Petiot in May 1943, not for murder but because they suspected his escape network was real and wanted to infiltrate it. He was jailed and, by his own later account, tortured. He was released in January 1944. When French police finally raided Rue Le Sueur in March 1944, a telegram arrived from German authorities at 1:30 in the morning while detectives were still on the scene. It read: 'Order from German authorities. Arrest Petiot. Dangerous lunatic.' That telegram worked in Petiot's favour. To many French officers, a man the Gestapo wanted arrested looked like a Resistance hero. Police dragged their feet on the manhunt. When they finally went to Rue Caumartin, his apartment was empty. The family had vanished. What happened next is one of the more extraordinary details of the whole case. Rather than flee Paris, Petiot grew a beard, changed his name to 'Captain Valeri,' and joined the French Forces of the Interior after the liberation of the city in August 1944. He became a legitimate Resistance fighter. He was good enough at it that a French newspaper ran a profile of him. Someone recognised his face. He was arrested at a Paris metro station in October 1944. The Trial Petiot went on trial in March 1946 on 135 criminal charges. He turned it into theatre. He maintained throughout that every person he'd killed was a German agent or a collaborator, and that he was a patriot who'd done France a service. He admitted killing 63 enemies of France between 1940 and 1945. When pressed on the 44 victims he hadn't been formally charged with, he told the court: 'I don't have to justify myself for murders I'm not accused of committing.' On the fifth day of the trial, judges, jurors and Petiot were all taken to 21 Rue Le Sueur. As he walked through a crowd of police and jeering neighbours, Petiot reportedly quipped: 'Peculiar homecoming, don't you think?' He was convicted of 26 murders and sentenced to death. He was guillotined on May 25, 1946, at the age of 49. Accounts of his final moments describe him as calm and sardonic to the end, reportedly telling the executioner: 'Gentlemen, I ask you not to look. This will not be pretty.' How Many Did He Actually Kill? The official conviction covers 26 victims. Petiot himself claimed 63. Investigators at the time suspected the real figure was somewhere between 60 and 150, and some estimates go higher. The problem is that the war provided perfect cover: in occupied Paris, people disappeared constantly, and their families were often too frightened or too scattered to report it. Many of Petiot's victims had no one left to notice they were gone. The 200 million francs in stolen money was never found. The triangular room at Rue Le Sueur was demolished. Petiot remains one of the most notorious serial killers in French history, operating almost entirely in the open, in a city full of police, under the noses of both the French authorities and the Gestapo simultaneously. The chaos of occupation didn't just give him cover. It gave him his victims. Sources 1. Wikipedia: Marcel Petiot 2. Britannica: Marcel Petiot 3. Murderpedia: Marcel Petiot 4. Sky History: Marcel Petiot: A Serial Killer in Nazi Paris 5. NBC News: Doctor turned grisly serial killer in WWII Paris 6. Crime Library: Dr. Marcel Petiot 7. Stew Ross: Jacques the Ripper 8. Talk Murder: Marcel Petiot 9. EBSCO Research Starters: Marcel Petiot 10. King, David. Death in the City of Light. Crown Publishers, 2011. 11. Maeder, Thomas. The Unspeakable Crimes of Dr. Petiot. Little, Brown, 1980.

In June 1962, Bert Stern booked a suite at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, ordered a case of 1953 Dom Pérignon, and waited for Marilyn Monroe. She arrived alone, several hours late. Six weeks later, she was dead. What happened across two separate shoots that month became one of the most famous photography sessions in history: nearly 2,700 images, a handful of crossed-out negatives, and a Vogue spread that ran as a memorial. Who Was Bert Stern? In 1962, Bert Stern was one of the most sought-after photographers in the world. He'd built his reputation on advertising work: including a now-legendary 1955 Smirnoff campaign shot in front of the Egyptian pyramids: and had gone on to photograph some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlon Brando. A Vogue contract gave him 10 pages per issue of his own choosing. When he finally got the assignment to shoot Marilyn Monroe, it was arguably the last major star he hadn't yet photographed. He wasn't coy about his intentions going in. In his 1982 book about the shoot, he wrote: "I was preparing for Marilyn's arrival like a lover, and yet I was here to take photographs. Not to take her in my arms, but to turn her into tones, and planes and shapes and ultimately into an image for the printed page." Making love and making photographs were, in his own words, closely connected in his mind when it came to women. The First Shoot: Early June 1962 The first session took place in Suite 261 at the Bel-Air, just the two of them, along with Monroe's hairstylist. Stern had brought diaphanous scarves and beads from the Vogue accessories closet. When Monroe arrived, he reportedly said simply: "You're beautiful." She replied: "What a nice thing to say." What followed was a 12-hour session fuelled by champagne. Stern later said he didn't ask her to pose nude: it was, in his telling, "more one thing leading to another: you take clothes off and off and off and off and off." The resulting photographs showed Monroe draped in sheer scarves, pearls, and silk sheets, or nothing at all. She was 35 years old, recently out of gallbladder surgery, and the scar was still fresh and clearly visible in many of the unretouched images. Stern airbrushed it out of the final prints. Vogue's picture editor Alexander Liberman loved what he saw: but wanted more black-and-white work to better suit the magazine's format. So Stern went back. The Second Shoot: Late June, Three Days The second round of sessions took place over three full days, this time in Bungalow 96, a larger space at the same hotel. This sitting had more of a production around it: a full team rather than just the two of them: which Monroe reportedly found less comfortable. The shoot produced a second series, more formally shot than the first, including a memorable sequence in which Monroe dressed more conservatively, in what many took as a playful nod to Jackie Kennedy. Across both sessions, Stern shot close to 2,700 frames in total. The images spanned fashion portraits, nudes, and everything in between. It was Monroe's first collaboration with Vogue: extraordinary for a woman who had been one of the most photographed people on the planet for over a decade. Marilyn's Crossed-Out Negatives After the shoot, Stern sent contact sheets and negatives to both Vogue and Monroe for review. Vogue made their selections. Monroe made hers differently. She went through the images she didn't like and marked or scratched out the ones she didn't want published. Stern's response to this, once published, became one of the most quoted lines associated with the shoot: "She hadn't just scratched out my pictures, she scratched out herself." Vogue proceeded to publish their original selection anyway, ignoring Monroe's objections. The spread ran in the September 1962 issue: eight pages, all black and white, Monroe fully clothed. By the time the issue hit newsstands, she had been dead for weeks. The editors added a note: "The word of Marilyn Monroe's death came just as this issue of Vogue went to press." The Legacy of the Last Sitting Technically, The Last Sitting wasn't the absolute last professional shoot Monroe did. That distinction belongs to photographer George Barris, who shot her on a Santa Monica beach and in the Hollywood Hills for Cosmopolitan between June and July 18, 1962, just two and a half weeks before her death. The Stern sessions had taken place about six weeks earlier. But the Bert Stern work has always carried the "Last Sitting" name, partly because of the intimacy of what he captured, and partly because Vogue published it as a posthumous memorial. Monroe died on August 4, 1962, of a barbiturate overdose. She was 36. The cause and circumstances have been debated ever since. Stern published a book of the images in 1982 under the title The Last Sitting, including many of the contact sheets with Monroe's crossed-out photos intact: scratches, X marks and all. In 2000, the complete archive of 2,571 images was published under the title The Complete Last Sitting, making all of the surviving photographs available for the first time. The images with Monroe's hairpin scratches through them have become some of the most recognised of the entire collection: there's something about seeing her try to erase herself that keeps people coming back to them. The photographs sell at auction for tens of thousands of dollars. In 2008, Stern recreated several of the images with a new subject for comparison. He died in 2013. The Last Sitting remains what it's always been: the last proper look at someone the camera had been chasing for twenty years, taken six weeks before she disappeared entirely. Sources 1. Bert Stern Trust: The Last Sitting (Official Site) 2. Wikipedia: The Last Sitting 3. Classic Six: The Last Sitting, Marilyn Monroe and Bert Stern 4. Club Oenologique: The Story of Marilyn Monroe's Champagne-Fuelled Last Sitting 5. Dusty Old Thing: 8 Surprising Facts About Marilyn Monroe's Iconic Last Sitting 6. Artsy: Behind the Scenes of Marilyn Monroe's Final Photoshoot with Bert Stern 7. Wikipedia: Bert Stern 8. Stern, Bert. The Last Sitting. William Morrow and Company, 1982.

In May 1944, Life magazine ran a photo of a young woman named Natalie Nickerson sitting at a desk, chin resting on her hand, writing a thank-you note. Sitting in front of her was a human skull. According to the magazine, her Navy boyfriend had sent it from New Guinea, signed by him and 13 friends, inscribed: "This is a good Jap — a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach." Life ran it as their Picture of the Week. American censors passed it without issue. Decades later, a family member of Nickerson's told Snopes the whole thing was a staged photo shoot, she didn't actually have a boyfriend in the Pacific, and she later felt regret about being talked into it. Whether the skull itself was real or a prop remains unknown. But the fact that censors waved it through, and the public largely accepted it, tells you everything about the cultural moment. The mutilation of Japanese service personnel included the taking of body parts as “war souvenirs” and “war trophies”. Teeth and skulls were the most commonly taken “trophies”, although other body parts were also collected. It Started at Guadalcanal The collection of body parts from Japanese war dead began almost as soon as American forces came into contact with the enemy. Historian Simon Harrison, who wrote the definitive academic paper on the subject "Skull Trophies of the Pacific War" concluded that the practice started on a scale large enough to alarm military authorities from the very first engagements, particularly the Battle of Guadalcanal in late 1942. Teeth and skulls were the most prized items, but soldiers also took ears, noses, fingers, and bones. Skulls were often prepared by boiling the head, then scraping or dragging it behind a ship in a net to clean and polish it. A poet named Winfield Townley Scott, working as a newspaper reporter in Rhode Island in 1944, witnessed a sailor displaying his skull trophy in the office and was so disturbed he wrote a poem about it, "The U.S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull" describing the whole grim preparation process. By September 1942, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet had seen enough. He issued a formal order: no part of the enemy's body could be used as a souvenir, and any serviceman found doing so would face "stern disciplinary action." The Joint Chiefs of Staff had to issue the same order again in January 1944. Neither one made much difference. 1945 image of a Japanese soldier's severed head hung on a tree branch, presumably by American troops. Just How Widespread Was It? The honest answer is: nobody knows for certain. But the evidence that it was extremely common is hard to argue with. When Charles Lindbergh passed through customs in Hawaii in 1944 on his way back from observing Pacific combat operations, the customs agent asked him point-blank whether he was carrying any bones. Lindbergh was apparently startled by the question. The agent explained it had become completely routine, so many servicemen had been caught smuggling Japanese remains home that bones were now a standard customs declaration category. In his wartime diary, Lindbergh also recorded a conversation with a Marine officer who told him that mutilating Japanese corpses, cutting off ears, noses, and the like, was common practice. In October 1943, the U.S. High Command grew alarmed after a series of newspaper articles ran in the domestic press. One reported a soldier making a string of beads out of Japanese teeth. Another included a step-by-step photo spread of how to prepare a skull, complete with cooking and scraping instructions. These weren't leaked or suppressed, they passed through military censors. U.S. war correspondent Edward L. Jones put it plainly in a 1946 piece for The Atlantic: "We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers. American marines with a collection of Japanese skulls. WW2, 1944. The clearest post-war evidence came in 1984, when the remains of Japanese soldiers killed in the Mariana Islands were repatriated to Japan. Around 60 percent of the bodies sent home were missing their skulls. In 1985, a Japanese Buddhist priest who had been conducting funeral rites on Iwo Jima since 1952 reported that most of the bodies he'd worked with over the years had had their skulls removed. A Letter Opener Made From a Dead Man's Arm Perhaps the most surreal moment in the whole grim story came in 1944, when U.S. Representative Francis E. Walter presented President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a letter opener. It had been carved from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier. When the news became public in Japan, it caused a national uproar. The story was reprinted extensively in the Japanese press alongside the Life magazine skull photo, and was used to portray Americans as, in the words of reporting at the time, "deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman." Roosevelt ordered the letter opener to be returned and given a proper burial. It's worth noting he didn't demand to know how such a thing ended up on his desk, he just wanted it gone. Skull stewing-Pacific War What Made the Japanese Different From Other Enemies American soldiers didn't do this to German or Italian war dead. That contrast is stark and uncomfortable, and historians haven't shied away from naming it directly. A December 1944 poll asked American soldiers whether they'd want to kill enemy soldiers. About half agreed when asked about Japanese soldiers. Fewer than 10 percent agreed when the question was about Germans. Historian Niall Ferguson, who specializes in German history, called this pattern one of the most troubling aspects of the entire Second World War, the fact that Allied troops treated the Japanese in broadly the same way that Nazi Germany treated Slavic peoples. Front line warning sign using a Japanese soldier's skull on Peleliu October 1944 The dehumanization was systematic. U.S. wartime media routinely described Japanese people as "yellow vermin." An official U.S. Navy film referred to Japanese troops as "living, snarling rats." The shock of Pearl Harbor had amplified pre-existing racism, and the propaganda machinery turned it into something that made ordinary men feel comfortable mutilating human remains. Harrison's research also pointed to another cultural factor: many American servicemen came from hunting backgrounds where keeping animal trophies was normal and even admired. Combined with the dehumanization of the enemy, that mentality translated directly to the battlefield. You treated the dead Japanese body the way you'd treat a deer. The Long Aftermath The trophy skulls didn't disappear when the war ended. They went home in duffel bags, sat on mantlepieces, got passed down through families, and occasionally turned up in the most awkward places imaginable. On several occasions, police investigating murder cases had to call in forensic experts after discovering what turned out to be old Japanese war trophies, not evidence of a recent crime. Repatriation efforts have continued for decades. Japan and the United States have cooperated on returning remains, though the process is slow and complicated by the fact that many families who received skulls either don't know what they have or don't want to come forward. Some bones have been quietly handed over to local officials. In 2010, the U.S. government passed the War Graves Protection Act, tightening restrictions on the trade and ownership of human remains taken as war trophies. The official line has always been that this was aberrant behavior by a small minority. The numbers from the Mariana Islands suggest otherwise. When 60 percent of returned bodies are missing their heads, that's not a few bad apples. That's policy failure on a massive scale, dressed up in the language of individual wrongdoing. The Pacific War was brutal in ways that the European theater simply wasn't, and some historians argue the mutilation has to be understood in the context of what both sides were doing. Japanese forces committed documented atrocities throughout Asia and against Allied prisoners of war. Rage, revenge, and the brutalizing effect of months in a jungle combat zone all played a role. But the scale makes that explanation hard to sustain as a full defence. When 60 percent of repatriated bodies are missing their skulls, you're not looking at isolated breakdowns under pressure. You're looking at something that was tolerated, enabled, and in some cases celebrated. Bones were carved into letter openers and sent to congressmen. Skulls showed up in newspaper offices. Soldiers made strings of beads from teeth. The military banned it twice and prosecuted it almost never. That's not a few soldiers losing their moral compass in the fog of war. That's a society that had decided a particular enemy didn't fully count as human, and whose institutions quietly agreed. Sources 1. Harrison, Simon. "Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2006. 2. Wikipedia: American mutilation of Japanese war dead 3. Time / Life: Thank You, Sweetheart, for the Jap Skull 4. Snopes: Family of woman photographed in 1944 allegedly writing thank-you note for Japanese soldier's skull speaks out 5. Lapham's Quarterly: Human Trophies 6. n+1 Magazine: The Violence Is the Victory 7. WW2 Gravestone: American Soldiers Gone Bad During WW2 8. Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. Pantheon Books, 1986. 9. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Oxford University Press, 1989.

One morning in the early 1900s, a well-dressed American tourist was found dead on a side street in Paris. He'd been strangled with a handkerchief, beaten, stabbed multiple times, and stripped of everything he owned. When police arrived, they looked at the scene and said two words: les Apaches. Then they noted in their records that he should have known better than to wander alone at night, and moved on. That response tells you something about the Apaches. By the first decade of the twentieth century they weren't just a criminal problem in Paris, they were an institution. Everybody knew the name, everybody knew the territory, and the police had largely made peace with the fact that certain parts of the city belonged to them after dark. In the working-class districts of Belleville, Ménilmontant, Charonne, and the outer fortifications, the Apaches ran things. They mugged, they stabbed, they extorted, and they dressed with a flair that made the bourgeoisie simultaneously terrified and, eventually, fascinated. Where the Name Came From The Apaches didn't name themselves. The name was given to them by the press, and it stuck because everyone involved liked it. In November 1900, a police inspector in the Belleville district was describing a particularly brutal crime scene to a journalist named Victor Moris and finished his account with the phrase: it's a real Apache thing, drawing a comparison to what Europeans imagined to be the savagery of the Native American Apache tribes. Geronimo had surrendered only fourteen years earlier and was still alive, an international celebrity in his captivity, and the French papers had been running breathless coverage of the American West for years. Moris put the word in print. A story in a 1910 Sunday supplement of Le Petit Journal described what happened next: a gang leader nicknamed Terreur heard that his crew was being compared to the Apaches and was so pleased with the comparison that he immediately renamed his gang the Apaches of Belleville. Within a couple of years, the name had spread across the whole subculture. By 1907, Le Petit Journal was running front-page coverage with the headline: More than 30,000 prowlers against 8,000 city officers: the apache is the plague of Paris. Who They Were and Where They Came From The Apaches were a product of a specific moment in French urban history. By the 1870s and 1880s, Paris was swelling with the children of rural migrants who'd come to the city looking for industrial work and found instead overcrowded tenements, low wages, and a social order that had no particular interest in their welfare. Juvenile delinquency had been a feature of the outer arrondissements for decades before the Apache name arrived. What changed around the turn of the century was organisation, visibility, and a distinct sense of identity. The typical Apache was young, male, working-class, and emphatically opposed to what he called honest labour. He lived in the dense, poorly lit streets of the outer city, gathered with his crew in guinguettes (the open-air dance halls on the city's edges) and in certain bars and cabarets that served as recognised Apache meeting points. The Cabaret de l'Ange Gabriel became one of the most infamous of these. He spoke a specialised criminal slang called jare, which was deliberately opaque to outsiders, including police. The gangs operated on a loose but recognised territorial basis. Les Orteaux controlled one patch, the Popincourt gang another. They had leaders, hierarchies, and a strict code of conduct around silence when arrested: a proper Apache did not give names or information to the police, no matter what. This code held up, for the most part, until the trial of 1902 that followed the Casque d'Or affair revealed just how much the press, the public, and eventually the courts could disrupt it. Apache layering The Look What made the Apaches genuinely unusual as a criminal subculture was how carefully they dressed. Flared trousers, striped Breton jerseys, red flannel sashes worn as a belt, casquette caps tilted at a precise angle. They paid serious attention to their footwear: freshly polished pointed yellow boots with golden buttons were considered the height of Apache style, and a man's shoes were taken as a direct indicator of his standing within the group. They wore their hair in a specific style, they carried themselves with a deliberate swagger, and their tattoos were documented and photographed by newspapers of the period as identifying markers. This attention to appearance was not incidental. It was a statement. The Apaches were anti-bourgeois in the most literal sense: they defined themselves against the respectable working man and the middle class, and their style was a constant visible provocation. A Parisian who encountered a group of men in Breton stripes and pointed yellow boots at night knew exactly what that meant, and the knowledge was the point. The Apache Revolver and Other Tools of the Trade The Apaches carried weapons, and one in particular became so associated with them that it took their name. The Apache revolver was a multi-purpose weapon designed by Louis Dolne in Liège, Belgium, in the 1860s and manufactured until the end of the 1870s. It combined a six-round pinfire pepperbox revolver with a retractable brass-knuckle grip and a folding double-edged dagger. In theory this gave the user a firearm, a melee weapon, and a close-quarters punching tool in one compact device. In practice, the lack of a proper barrel made it wildly inaccurate at any distance, and the mechanism had a documented tendency to discharge unexpectedly, causing injuries to the person carrying it rather than any intended target. It was, in short, a weapon considerably more dangerous to its owner than to his enemies. It was banned in New York and several other cities. The Apaches carried it anyway, partly because it was effective enough at very close range and partly because it looked good. Their other standard weapon was the surin, a long knife with a distinctive pistol-like curved grip that bore similarities to certain traditional knives from the Pyrenees region. This was the workhorse of Apache violence: reliable, concealable, and effective. Their signature mugging technique was the Coup du Père François, the Trick of Father Francis. One attacker garrotted the victim from behind while mounting him piggyback to prevent struggling. A second associate emptied the victim's pockets. The whole operation took a few seconds. Most victims survived. The Dance The Apaches had their own dance, and it outlived them by decades. La Danse Apache was a theatrical, aggressive performance that reenacted what was generally understood to be the dynamic between an Apache man and his gigolette: close steps, sudden throws, the woman dragged across the floor and flung through the air while managing to convey both distress and desire. It was violent to watch and technically demanding to perform, and it spread with remarkable speed from the guinguettes of Belleville into the music halls, then across Europe and to America. An early filmed version appeared in 1904, directed by Gaston Velle for Pathé, with acrobatic dancers from La Scala in Paris. By 1908 it had original music composed for it: Valse Apache, written by Fernand Le Borne for a silent film featuring Mistinguett and Max Dearly. By 1909 the first Apache Gala Ball was held in Paris, a fancy dress event at which the wealthy dressed as gangsters and gigolettes and danced in rooms decorated to look like the dens of Belleville. Gang culture had been successfully gentrified. The dance's influence extended further than most people realise. Historians of dance have traced elements of the Apache style into the early development of tango, and there's a case to be made that its rhythmic structure influenced Maurice Ravel, who was paying close attention to the culture of the Paris underworld at exactly the moment the dance went mainstream. Maurice Ravel's Société des Apaches In 1903, while the real Apaches were running their territories in Belleville and Ménilmontant, a very different kind of Apache organisation was meeting weekly in a private house in Paris. The Société des Apaches was a salon of avant-garde musicians and artists founded by Ravel, the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, and the writer and critic Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi. The name was a deliberate provocation, adopted to signal contempt for the conservatism of the French musical establishment in roughly the same spirit as the original gang's defiance of bourgeois respectability. The group's membership was informal and fluid, with over twenty participants attending at various points. Igor Stravinsky was among them. Ravel composed several major works during his years with the group, including Miroirs in 1905. The Société des Apaches dissolved, as the gangs themselves did, when the First World War arrived. The War That Ended Them The Apaches didn't disappear because of policing. The 30,000 figure Le Petit Journal had cited in 1907 suggests the authorities had made limited progress in suppressing them despite the moral panic they generated. What ended the Apache subculture was the First World War. The young men of Belleville and Ménilmontant, the same age cohort that formed the Apaches' core, were conscripted in enormous numbers in 1914. A significant proportion of them were killed on the Western Front. The ones who survived came back to a changed city. Crime in Paris didn't end with the Apaches. But the specific combination of territorial gang identity, elaborate dress code, distinctive slang, and cultural visibility that had defined the subculture didn't reassemble. The pointed yellow boots and the Breton stripes faded from the streets. The guinguettes changed. The fortifications the gangs had used as meeting grounds and battlefields were demolished between 1919 and 1929 as part of a city development programme. The Apaches left something behind, though. The dance survived in various forms for decades. The word apache became standard across Europe for a certain kind of street criminal: there were Russian apaches, British apaches, American apaches. Hollywood made Apache dance sequences well into the 1960s. The open-collar shirt style associated with the subculture still carries the name. And the argument can be made, only half-jokingly, that the Apaches were the first modern youth subculture: a group defined not by politics or religion but by style, territory, and a shared refusal to fit in. Everything that came after them, from the teddy boys to the mods to the punks, owes something to the men in the pointed yellow boots. Sources 1. Wikipedia: Apaches (subculture) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apaches_(subculture) 2. Wikipedia: Apache revolver – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_revolver 3. Wikipedia: Apache (dance) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_(dance) 4. Wikipedia: Les Apaches (Société) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Apaches 5. Bonjour Paris: The Dandy Criminals who Terrorized Paris – https://bonjourparis.com/history/the-dandy-criminals-who-terrorized-paris/ 6. New York Almanack: Apaches in Paris and New York – https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2020/07/apaches-in-paris-and-new-york/ 7. Word Histories: The Apaches of Paris – https://wordhistories.net/2020/05/04/apache-paris-ruffian/ 8. Messy Nessy Chic: When Dangerous Dancing Dandies were the Bad Boys of Paris – https://www.messynessychic.com/2022/09/07/the-parisian-street-gangs-that-dabbled-with-dandyism/

In the spring of 1902, the newspapers of Paris couldn't get enough of a young woman named Amélie Élie. They called her Casque d'Or, the Golden Helmet, a reference to her distinctive mass of blonde hair piled high in the style of the day. She was 23 years old, working as a gigolette in the dance halls and streets of the 11th arrondissement, and she had just become the most talked-about woman in the city, not because of anything she had done herself, but because two of the most dangerous men in the Parisian underworld were trying to kill each other over her. The trial that followed turned Élie into a genuine celebrity at a time when celebrity, in its modern sense, was still a relatively new phenomenon. The mass-circulation newspapers of the Belle Époque had created an audience hungry for exactly this kind of story: glamour, violence, passion, and the exotic world of the Apaches, Paris's notorious street gangs. Élie gave them all of it. The Apaches of Paris To understand Élie's story, you need to know something about the world she moved through. The Apaches were a subculture of working-class Parisian street gangs that dominated the city's underworld from roughly the 1890s through to the First World War. The name was coined around 1902 by a journalist named Victor Moris, after a police inspector described a particularly bloody crime scene to him using the phrase 'c'est un véritable truc d'Apaches,' a real Apache thing, drawing a comparison to the ferocity attributed to Native American Apache warriors. The gangs liked the name and adopted it. The Apaches dressed with deliberate flair: flared trousers, striped Breton jerseys, red flannel sashes, and casquette caps worn at an angle. They spoke an obscure slang called jare, carried knives and a distinctive multi-purpose weapon known as the Apache revolver, and abhorred what they called honest labour. They operated in the working-class outer districts of Paris, particularly Belleville and Ménilmontant, running protection rackets, mugging the bourgeoisie, and gathering in the city's guinguettes, the popular open-air dance halls where the apache dance, a highly theatrical combination of close steps and violent-looking throws, became their signature. The Apaches operated by a strict code of silence. Gang members who were arrested were expected to give nothing to the police, not names, not locations, not information about crimes. The code held, mostly, until Amélie Élie came along. From Orléans to the Streets of Paris Élie was born at 3am on 14 March 1878 in Orléans, the daughter of a tinsmith named Gustave Élie and his wife Marie-Louise. The family moved to the 11th arrondissement of Paris when she was young, settling into the densely populated working-class neighbourhood where she would spend most of her life. Living conditions in the 11th were hard. The area was home to artisans and industrial workers, and the combination of overcrowding and poverty produced the kind of street culture in which the Apaches thrived. At 13, Élie ran away with a boy two years older than her. Her parents collected her back. She ran away again. After several repetitions of this, her parents gave up, and Élie found herself on her own in Paris. She was a teenager with no income and no family support. Through a woman named Hélène de Courtille, an established prostitute with wealthy clients who acted as mentor, close friend, and possibly lover, Élie was introduced to the trade. Courtille became possessive. Élie moved on. She found a pimp named Bouchon, who provided protection but was violently jealous and beat her when she failed to meet her daily earnings quota. She eventually escaped from him too. Manda, Leca, and the Feud After leaving Bouchon, Élie met Joseph Pleigneur, known as Manda, a 22-year-old gang leader and one of the more prominent Apache figures in eastern Paris. Manda was drawn to her immediately and made his intentions clear by stabbing Bouchon, which in the context of the Apache world was both a statement of intent and a warning to anyone else who might have designs on Élie. Their relationship was unstable from the start. Manda was frequently absent, saw other women, and couldn't keep up financially with the lifestyle Élie expected. She eventually left him. Partly in an effort to win her back, Manda became the leader of a gang called Les Orteaux. Joseph Pleigneur (Manda) On the streets, Élie met Dominique François Eugène Leca, a member of a rival gang. She and Leca became involved. This was the spark. Manda's jealousy turned violent immediately. In 1902, Manda and several Orteaux members attacked Leca in a cab, stabbing him multiple times. Leca survived and was hospitalised. In keeping with the Apache code, he told the police nothing about who had attacked him or why. Once he was discharged, Manda's men came for him again and were finally apprehended by police. Dominique François Eugène Leca, The press had been following the story from the beginning, and by the time the case came to trial in May 1902, Paris was transfixed. Crowds gathered outside the courtroom trying to get in. Newspapers including Le Petit Journal ran detailed daily coverage, complete with descriptions of the men's appearance, their tattoos, their Apache affiliations, and the woman at the centre of it all. Élie herself was described in terms that mixed fascination with barely concealed moral condemnation: beautiful, manipulative, the kind of woman men couldn't resist and couldn't control. The Trial and the Code That Broke When Élie testified, she broke with the Apache code of silence. She revealed names, details, and information about the gang's operations that the underworld had expected to stay buried. For many in the Apache world, this was an unforgivable betrayal. For the newspapers and the public following the case, it made her simultaneously more sympathetic and more sensational: a woman who had navigated a brutal world on her own terms and was now, under oath, saying what she knew. The verdicts were severe. Manda claimed crimes of passion and was sentenced to a lifetime of forced labour in the penal colonies. Leca was sentenced to eight years in a penal colony. Both men were effectively removed from Parisian life permanently. Élie emerged from the trial famous. Portrait painters approached her. Theatre producers wanted her in their shows. She wrote an account of her experiences for Fin de Siècle, a journal of the period, which was later published in its entirety by a historian. The fame was intense but brief. Celebrity in 1902 had a short half-life, and Élie had no particular means of sustaining it. She made some money from the attention and then, gradually, the spotlight moved elsewhere. After the Fame The later years of Élie's life were quiet by comparison. On 17 January 1917, nearly fifteen years after the trial that had made her name, she married André Alexandre Nardin, a shoemaker twenty years her junior. Nardin was 23. Élie was nearly 40. He had four children from a previous relationship, and Élie helped raise them. The couple lived modestly in Paris on Nardin's small income. She died on 6 April 1933, aged 55, from an unstated illness. She'd never left Paris. The city that had made her infamous had also simply absorbed her back into its working-class fabric, as if the trial, the newspapers, and the two men sent to the colonies on her account had been someone else's story entirely. Casque d'Or: The Film Nineteen years after her death, Élie's story was turned into a film. Casque d'Or, directed by Jacques Becker and released in 1952, stars Simone Signoret as Marie, the character based on Élie, and Serge Reggiani as Manda. The film compresses and fictionalises the story considerably: the character of Leca is recast as the leader of the gang rather than a rival, the romance between Marie and Manda is given greater weight and tragedy than the historical record supports, and many of the period's grittier details are smoothed over in favour of a more cinematic love story. None of which diminished the film's reputation. Casque d'Or is now regarded as one of the finest French films of the postwar era, a masterpiece of atmosphere and restraint. Signoret won a BAFTA for her performance. The film failed at the box office on its original release, was pulled after two weeks, and was then rediscovered by critics who recognised it as something exceptional. It's been on the Criterion Collection and cited regularly in surveys of the greatest films ever made. Amélie Élie is still remembered on the streets of Paris Amélie Élie died in obscurity, a widow in a quiet Paris flat, with nothing to suggest that the story of her youth would eventually become a celebrated piece of French cinema. She'd been a teenage runaway, a gigolette, a woman who survived several violent and controlling men, and then a briefly famous face in the newspapers. The hair that gave her the nickname had gone white long before the end. The city had moved on. She'd just lived in it. Sources 1. Wikipedia: Amélie Élie – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Am%C3%A9lie_%C3%89lie 2. Wikipedia: Apaches (subculture) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apaches_(subculture) 3. RetroNews / BnF: Casque d'Or, légendaire fille de joie des Apaches – https://www.retronews.fr/justice/long-format/2018/05/15/casque-dor-legendaire-fille-de-joie-des-apaches 4. Gallica / BnF: Casque d'Or et les Apaches – https://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/fr/html/casque-dor-et-les-apaches 5. Gang de Paris: L'Histoire de Casque d'Or – https://gangdeparis.com/blogs/articles/lhistoire-de-casque-dor-partie-2 6. Lucy Sante, The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) 7. Jérôme Beauchez, 'The Iconic Apache: Early 1900s Paris and the Making of a Criminal Bogeyman', The British Journal of Criminology, 2024 8. Criterion Collection: Philip Kemp, 'Casque d'or: Tenderness and Violence' – https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/679-casque-d-or-tenderness-and-violence 9. Bonjour Paris: The Dandy Criminals who Terrorized Paris – https://bonjourparis.com/history/the-dandy-criminals-who-terrorized-paris/

Most people know Dennis Hopper as the actor who co-wrote, directed, and starred in Easy Rider in 1969, or from any number of roles that followed across five decades. Fewer know that in the years before Easy Rider, when Hollywood had largely decided he was too difficult to work with, Hopper spent his time doing something else entirely. He had a Nikon slung around his neck almost constantly, and he was photographing everything: film sets, art galleries, civil rights marches, bullfights, Harlem street corners, biker couples, and the faces of people who would shortly become some of the most famous names in American culture. The six-year body of work he produced between 1961 and 1967 is one of the more remarkable accidental archives in the history of American photography. It didn't surface in its full form until 2009, when a limited collector's edition was published by Taschen. A general release followed in 2011, and a smaller second edition appeared in 2018. By then Hopper had been dead for a year, but the photographs had finally found the audience they deserved. How It Started: A Birthday Camera and a Piece of Advice from James Dean The camera came from his first wife, Brooke Hayward, who spent her last $351 on a Nikon for him. The impulse to use it came from James Dean, with whom Hopper had appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant in 1955 and 1956. Hopper had mentioned to Dean that he wanted to direct films one day, and Dean told him to take up photography to train his eye. Hopper filed that away. When the camera arrived, he put Dean's advice to work. Dennis Hopper, Natalie Wood, and James Dean in Rebel Without s Cause. The timing of all this matters. By 1961, Hopper's acting career had stalled badly. His reputation for clashing with directors, most notoriously with Henry Hathaway on the set of From Hell to Texas in 1958, had made him difficult to cast. He wasn't blacklisted exactly, but the major studios had cooled on him significantly. So while his contemporaries were building their screen careers, Hopper was out on the streets with a Nikon F 35mm, shooting whatever he found in front of him. He got the nickname 'The Tourist' from his friends, because the camera was always there, always pointing at something. Double Standard and the LA Landscape His most famous single photograph, Double Standard, was taken in 1961 at the junction of Melrose, Doheny and Santa Monica in Los Angeles. It shows two Shell gas station signs rising above the intersection, slightly out of alignment with each other, the geometry of commercial America rendered strange and slightly ominous by the angle and framing. It's the kind of image that sits comfortably alongside the work of Ed Ruscha, who Hopper was photographing in his studio around the same time. Both men were looking at the Los Angeles landscape and seeing something that the rest of the art world hadn't quite caught up with yet. Hopper was embedded in the LA art scene in a way that was unusual for a Hollywood actor. He and Hayward lived at 1712 North Crescent Heights, a house that became a gathering point for artists, musicians, and filmmakers. He photographed Jasper Johns there. He documented Andy Warhol at Warhol's first West Coast show. He shot Ed Ruscha in 1964 in a portrait that captures something of the cool, slightly removed quality that ran through Ruscha's own work. These weren't celebrity snapshots. Hopper was paying close attention, and it shows. Tina Turner, Paul Newman, and the Access Money Can't Buy Being an actor, even a currently-out-of-favour one, opened doors that a conventional documentary photographer couldn't have walked through. Hopper photographed Tina Turner in the studio with Ike during the recording sessions that led to the 1966 album River Deep, Mountain High, for which he also shot the cover art. He photographed Paul Newman on set. He was there when Jane Fonda married Roger Vadim in Las Vegas and got a photograph of that too. He documented Warhol's Factory crowd, the Hell's Angels, hippies, and in quieter moments, complete strangers on streets in Harlem and Mexico and Peru. Writer Terry Southern, who would later co-write Easy Rider with Hopper, profiled him in Better Homes and Gardens in the mid-1960s as a photographer to watch. That's a sentence that requires a moment to sit with: Dennis Hopper, the wild man of Hollywood, profiled in Better Homes and Gardens as a serious photographer. The photographs were starting to appear in Vogue. He was shooting for magazines. This was a real secondary career, not a hobby. Selma, 1965 The most politically charged images in the archive came from Alabama. In 1965, Hopper travelled to Selma to take part in the third civil rights march to Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King Jr. He was 28 years old and went as both participant and photographer. His photographs of King on that march, and of the crowd of around fifty thousand people who had gathered, were published and represent some of the more significant documentary images from the civil rights movement to have been taken by someone outside the world of professional photojournalism. His friend Stewart Stern, who was also on the march, described the experience in detail: the crowd sitting on the ground, King exhausted and almost falling asleep on his feet, the National Guard with fixed bayonets, and the ugly hostility from officials directed at the white marchers who had come with the civil rights demonstrators. Hopper was in the middle of all of it with his camera. Biker Couple and the Road America Was About to Take One of the earliest photographs in the archive, and one of the most reproduced, is Biker Couple, taken in 1961. It shows a man and woman on a motorcycle, caught in a moment that manages to look simultaneously documentary and cinematic. The image predates Easy Rider by eight years. Looking at it now, knowing what Hopper would go on to make, it's tempting to read it as a premonition. Whether or not that's fair to the photograph, it does show that Hopper's eye was drawn very early to the counterculture figures who would define the decade. That early attention to bikers, hippies, and the social edges of American life was a consistent thread through the six years of photographs. Hopper wandered Harlem. He watched bullfights in Tijuana with what one critic described as fascination. He photographed cemeteries in Durango. He shot a Harlem billboard in 1962 that has the same attention to vernacular commercial signage as Double Standard. Wherever he was, the camera went. The Taschen Book and Why It Took So Long The 2009 limited edition published by Taschen was a remarkable object. Compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi, it ran to 544 pages, measured 30 by 33 centimetres, and weighed 5.5 kilograms. Only 1,500 copies were made, each signed by Hopper himself. An Art Edition included a gelatin print of Biker Couple. The general release edition that followed in 2011 made the work accessible, and a smaller 2018 reprint extended its availability further. More than a third of the photographs in the collection had never been published before. Hopper had been sitting on this archive for decades. The reason it stayed private for so long is probably simple: Easy Rider happened, and then the chaos of the 1970s happened, and Hopper spent the next thirty years being Dennis Hopper the actor rather than Dennis Hopper the photographer. The pictures waited. What makes the archive unusual is the combination of access and instinct. Hopper could get into rooms that most photographers couldn't, because he was a recognisable face in the worlds he was moving through. But the photographs don't look like the work of someone coasting on access. They look like the work of someone paying real attention, which is exactly what James Dean had told him to do. Sources 1. Dennis Hopper: Photographs 1961-1967, published by Taschen (2009/2011/2018): https://www.taschen.com/en/books/film/44840/dennis-hopper-photographs-1961-1967/ 2. Hollywood Reporter photo gallery and captions: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/photography-dennis-hopper-168582/ 3. Design Art Magazine: https://www.designartmagazine.com/2014/09/dennis-hopper-new-exhibition-of.html 4. Art Blart review and exhibition notes: https://artblart.com/tag/dennis-hopper-double-standard/ 5. Hartford Courant / PressReader exhibit review: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/hartford-courant-sunday/20181028/281517932114479 6. Ultimate Pop Culture Wiki / Dennis Hopper biography: https://ultimatepopculture.fandom.com/wiki/Dennis_Hopper

When Jimmy Savile died in October 2011 at the age of 84, the tributes were extensive. He was a national institution: the eccentric, tracksuitwearing DJ who had launched Top of the Pops, the much-loved host of Jim'll Fix It, a tireless charity fundraiser who had raised tens of millions for good causes and had been knighted for his efforts. Within a year of his death, all of that had been dismantled. What investigators found in its place was something that took Britain a long time to fully absorb. Savile was one of the most prolific sex offenders in British history. The Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC recorded 214 criminal offences including 34 rapes, committed across a 54-year period from 1955 to 2009. The youngest victim was eight years old. Over 450 people came forward to police, and broader investigations eventually put the total number of victims at over 500. The scale of what he did, and the number of institutions that either failed to stop him or actively enabled him, was described by police as unprecedented in the UK. The Access He Shouldn't Have Had Part of what made Savile so dangerous was the extraordinary range of institutions he moved through freely. At the BBC, where he worked for decades, he had access to studios, dressing rooms, and backstage areas where young people, many of them fans brought in for recordings of Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It, were present in large numbers. The Janet Smith Review, an independent inquiry into the culture at the BBC during Savile's years there, found that at least 72 people were sexually abused by him in connection with his BBC work, including eight who were raped. One victim was ten years old. His access to hospitals was, if anything, even more unrestricted. Savile was a major fundraiser for Leeds General Infirmary and for Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, where he raised millions for the spinal injuries unit. At both hospitals he was effectively given free run of the wards. At Stoke Mandeville, investigators found that he had abused 63 people, the youngest aged eight, over a period stretching from 1968 to 1992. He had his own room at the hospital and had told people he had 'lived' there. Nurses at the hospital reportedly instructed young patients to pretend to be asleep when Savile was approaching their ward. Jimmy Savile With Female Patients At Stoke Mandeville 14 August 1973 At Leeds General Infirmary, where he had begun abusing patients as early as 1962, investigators found a similar pattern. Savile was friends with the hospital's chief mortician, who gave him near-unrestricted access to the building including, allegedly, the mortuary. Former staff claimed Savile told them he had engaged in necrophilia with bodies there. These claims could not be verified, but the access itself was a documented fact. Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, was perhaps the most troubling institution of all. In 1988, the Department of Health appointed Savile to lead a taskforce overseeing the management of Broadmoor. He was given his own set of keys to the entire facility, including the wards housing some of the most vulnerable patients in the country. Former staff at Broadmoor later described an atmosphere in which complaints about his behaviour were not taken seriously. The Warnings That Were Ignored One of the most uncomfortable findings of the post-death investigations was how many times concerns about Savile were raised and then buried. His behaviour was described as an open secret at Stoke Mandeville as far back as 1973, where he was regarded as a sex pest by staff. Court cases involving allegations of him 'messing about with girls' had been paid off as early as the 1950s, according to his own associates. In the late 1970s, a detective constable named John Lindsay reported to his Thames Valley Police superiors that a nurse at Stoke Mandeville had told him staff were worried about Savile touching young girls inappropriately during his visits. He was told by a senior colleague not to worry about it, and that Savile must be alright given who he was. Lindsay raised the matter twice. Nothing was done. In 2007, Surrey Police investigated allegations of sexual assault at Duncroft, a Home Office-approved residential school for 'emotionally disturbed' girls in Staines, Surrey, where Savile had been a regular visitor for years. Savile was interviewed. The Crown Prosecution Service advised there was insufficient evidence to charge him. The following year, Sussex Police received a separate complaint. Again, no charges followed. In 2009, the CPS was presented with four potential cases of sexual assault. None of the alleged victims, the CPS said, would support a prosecution. After Savile's death, the CPS formally apologised for missing the opportunity to bring charges while he was still alive. The BBC Investigation That Never Aired On the day Savile died, a BBC Newsnight producer named Meirion Jones began investigating. Jones had a personal connection to the story. His aunt had been the headmistress at Duncroft School, and as a teenager in the early 1970s he had visited the school with his parents and seen Savile's white Rolls-Royce parked outside. He had always found something troubling about Savile's presence there. Jones and reporter Liz MacKean spent six weeks building the story, interviewing former Duncroft pupils who described being abused by Savile on BBC premises and at the school. One former pupil, Karin Ward, told them she had witnessed Gary Glitter having sex with another girl from the school in Savile's dressing room. The investigation was substantial and ready to broadcast in December 2011. Then Newsnight editor Peter Rippon dropped it. Savile's coffin on display at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, 8 November 2011 The BBC went ahead instead with two tribute programmes marking Savile's death. A subsequent independent inquiry led by Nick Pollard found the decision to shelve Newsnight's investigation had been wrong, and that there had been chaos and confusion at the BBC over how to handle it, though it found no evidence of a deliberate cover-up. The BBC's director general, George Entwistle, resigned. The BBC issued a formal apology to Savile's victims. Celebrity as a Shield What allowed Savile to operate for so long was not particularly complicated. It was fame, combined with an era in which the word of an adult about a working-class child carried overwhelming institutional weight. Victims who came forward were routinely disbelieved, dismissed, or told they must have misunderstood. Parents didn't believe their children. Police were told to stand down. Hospital staff warned children to pretend to be asleep. The police commander who led the post-death investigation, Peter Spindler, said the case demonstrated what happens when vulnerability collides with power. Jimmy Savile with his friend Margaret Thatcher Savile also cultivated political connections with unusual care. He dined at Chequers, the prime minister's country residence, with Margaret Thatcher on multiple occasions. He spent New Year's Eve at Chequers with Thatcher's family in both 1980 and 1981. He was photographed with royalty, with police chiefs, with hospital administrators. These associations were useful not only for fundraising but as a form of institutional protection. He was simply too prominent, too connected, and too apparently benevolent for the complaints of vulnerable teenagers to gain traction. The Reckoning That Came Too Late Because Savile died before the investigations began, he was never charged with anything. He never faced a courtroom. His estate, valued at around three million pounds, was eventually used to provide compensation to victims through a civil scheme, but the sums involved were modest. His gravestone in Scarborough was removed after the investigations concluded. His honorary degrees were revoked. The OBE and the papal knighthood he had been awarded by the Vatican could not be formally stripped posthumously. The investigations that followed his death resulted in a series of wider inquiries into the culture at the BBC, the NHS, and in law enforcement. Independent reviewer Kate Lampard examined Savile's access to around 40 NHS hospitals and set out recommendations for how institutions should handle celebrity fundraisers and volunteers. Operation Yewtree, the police investigation launched in the wake of the scandal, led to the arrest and prosecution of a number of other public figures, though some subsequent convictions were later overturned on appeal. The Savile case didn't just expose one man. It exposed the network of deference, institutional self-protection, and class-inflected disbelief that let him continue for more than fifty years. The victims had been telling the truth the whole time. Nobody in a position to act had wanted to hear it. Sources 1. Giving Victims a Voice: Joint Metropolitan Police/NSPCC Report (January 2013): https://www.nspcc.org.uk/globalassets/documents/research-reports/giving-victims-voice-jimmy-savile.pdf 2. The Dame Janet Smith Review: BBC/Jimmy Savile (February 2016) 3. Stoke Mandeville Hospital investigation report (February 2015): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/stoke-mandeville-hospital-a-review-of-the-response-to-concerns-about-jimmy-savile 4. BBC News Savile timeline: https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/uk-19921658 5. The Pollard Review (December 2012) 6. All That's Interesting: https://allthatsinteresting.com/jimmy-savile 7. The Oldie, Miles Goslett (January 2016): https://www.theoldie.co.uk/article/jimmy-savile-a-multiple-cover-up 8. The Guardian (Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean investigation account): https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-guardian-usa/20211103/281900186434452

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, a couple in New York came across a photograph at a flea market. It showed two men in an embrace, one hugging the other from behind, easy and tender and completely unselfconscious. Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell bought it because it represented them. They took it home and put it on their desk. They assumed they'd never find another one like it. Twenty-five years later, they had over 4,000. The result is Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, published in 2020 by 5 Continents Editions. It's a collection of vernacular photographs, meaning everyday snapshots rather than professional portraits, showing men in romantic settings across a full century of history. Kissing, holding each other, sitting in each other's laps, posing with arms around shoulders in ways that leave very little room for ambiguity. The photographs came from flea markets, shoe boxes, old suitcases, family archives, and eventually online auctions. They're from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United States, and a dozen other countries. And almost every single person in them is completely anonymous. How You Build a Collection Like This Nini and Treadwell kept their collection almost entirely private for years. They didn't think anyone else would be interested. When they finally began sharing it, the response caught them off guard. People wept. The images resonated across ages, genders, orientations, and political backgrounds in a way the collectors hadn't anticipated. Part of what makes the collection so striking is the method Nini and Treadwell developed for deciding which photographs belonged in it. They were well aware that men photographed together in friendly poses was historically common and not automatically romantic. Victorian and Edwardian men were comfortable with physical closeness in ways that read differently today. So the collectors set their own criteria. They looked at the eyes. Their rule was simple: there's a look two people have when they're in love that can't be manufactured and can't be hidden. If they saw it, the photo was in. The photographs span formats that trace the entire history of the medium: daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, silver gelatin prints, and amateur snapshots. Some are formal studio portraits. Others are obviously candid. One shows two men holding a printed sign that reads "Not Married But Willing to Be." The range of context is part of what makes the book so convincing. These aren't outliers or eccentrics. They're farmers, soldiers, businessmen, students, working-class men and middle-class men and men in uniforms, photographed across an entire century on multiple continents. Photographed When It Was Illegal The photographs in Loving were taken during a period when same-sex relationships were not just socially stigmatised but in many places criminal. In Britain, male homosexuality remained illegal until 1967. In the United States, sodomy laws persisted in some states until 2003. These photographs predate Stonewall, predate any organised rights movement, predate almost any public acknowledgment that queer love existed at all. And yet here they are. Men arranging themselves in front of cameras, in studios and on picnics and at beaches and in bedrooms, to document something they weren't supposed to feel. The act of taking the photograph was, in its quiet way, an act of defiance. Nobody who had this picture taken thought it was going to end up in a book a hundred years later. They did it because they wanted proof, for themselves or for each other, that what they had was real. Most of the images were found discarded. No names. No dates. No locations. No story attached. The people in them are gone, and their photographs were separated from whatever context they once had, which is how they ended up in flea market bins and online auction listings. The anonymity gives the book an ache that runs alongside its warmth. These were real people. We'll never know who they were. A Book That Became an Exhibition and Then a Sequel Loving was published in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and found its audience anyway. The response was wide enough that in 2023, a selection of 400 photographs from the Nini-Treadwell Collection was exhibited at the Musee Rath in Geneva, Switzerland, under the title Loving: The Exhibition. A second volume, Loving II: More Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, followed, drawing from the same collection of over 4,000 photographs and presenting images that didn't make the first book. The project has also attracted academic interest. The Nini-Treadwell Collection is now studied not just as queer history but as vernacular photography history. The technical range alone, from mid-nineteenth century daguerreotypes through to mid-twentieth century snapshots, makes it a significant archive of how photography evolved as a popular medium. The subjects just happen to also be quietly rewriting what we thought we knew about how men in love behaved when nobody was watching. Why Loving Matters Beyond the History There's a particular kind of historical erasure that doesn't come from burning records or rewriting textbooks. It comes from simply not preserving ordinary life. The grand archive of Victorian and Edwardian social history contains enormous amounts of detail about how people dressed, worked, travelled, and worshipped. It contains almost nothing about how queer people loved, because nobody was recording it officially and most of what was recorded privately got lost or destroyed. What Nini and Treadwell have assembled, photograph by photograph over a quarter century, is exactly that missing record. Not polished or curated or presented through any particular agenda, just ordinary people caught being in love. The book doesn't argue a thesis. It doesn't need to. The faces do the work. Via: The Guardian Buy: In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s–1950. Pictures via the Nini-Treadwell Collection. Sources 1. Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s. Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell (5 Continents Editions, 2020) 2. Loving II: More Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s. Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell (5 Continents Editions, 2024) 3. Nini-Treadwell Collection official site: https://www.loving1000.org 4. The Queer Review interview: https://thequeerreview.com/2020/11/01/exclusive-interview-hugh-nini-neal-treadwell-loving-a-photographic-history-of-men-in-love/ 5. Queer Love Podcast / Substack: https://queerloveproject.substack.com/p/hugh-nini-and-neal-treadwell-share 6. Simon and Schuster: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Loving-II/Hugh-Nini/Loving/9788874394456

She turned up to her first ever Vogue test shoot wearing a homemade brown wool suit, her hair long and wild, and she'd never once looked at a fashion magazine in her life. That was 1936. By 1949, she was on the cover of Time magazine, dubbed the "Billion Dollar Baby," and was being described in print as the highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business. Then she walked away from all of it, took up sculpture, and spent the rest of her life quietly insisting that modelling had never been the point. Lisa Fonssagrives was the world's first supermodel. She was also an artist, a dancer, a sculptor, a photographer, and a fashion designer who happened to fall into the most famous face of mid-century fashion almost entirely by accident. Her story is one of the most interesting and least-told in the history of the industry she helped invent. A Swedish Girl with Art in Her Bones Born Lisa Birgitta Bernstone on 17 May 1911 in Uddevalla, on the west coast of Sweden, she came from a family already comfortable with creativity. Her father was a dentist who painted in his spare time, and famously changed the family's surname from Andersson, which he considered too commonplace, to Bernstone. Her mother wove rugs and tapestries. Both parents regularly took the children to art exhibitions. Art wasn't a pursuit in the Bernstone household, it was the furniture. As a child, Lisa took up painting, sculpting, and dancing, as if she couldn't decide which talent to bet on. She eventually bet on dance. At 17, her parents wanted her to take cooking lessons. She refused. At 20, she moved to Berlin to train with Mary Wigman, a pioneer of expressionist modern dance, at the progressive Wigman Schule. After finishing there, she returned to Stockholm and opened her own dance school. In 1933, she boarded a train to Paris. A celebrated Swedish choreographer had invited her to join a dance competition. She fell in love with the city and never left. She studied art at the Sorbonne, met a fellow dancer named Fernand Fonssagrives, married him in 1935, and the two gave private dance lessons together in their apartment. It was a happy, creative, cash-strapped existence, and it was about to change in a lift. The Elevator, the Photographer, and the Suit The story of how Lisa Fonssagrives became a model is almost comically unplanned. In 1936, coming home after a long day to their apartment on the tenth floor, she stepped into the elevator and caught the eye of a man named Willy Maywald, a fashion photographer who shot for houses including Dior and Harper's Bazaar. He asked if she'd be willing to model some hats for him. She was, in her own words, "terribly shy but flattered." The hat photographs were taken. Fernand carried them to French Vogue. The magazine was impressed enough to arrange a test shoot with their in-house photographer, Horst P. Horst, one of the most important fashion photographers of the twentieth century. "I arrived terrified," she later recalled. "I had never seen a fashion magazine. I didn't know what fashion was. I made all my own clothes and I remember the suit I was wearing, dark brown wool, and I arrived so frightened with my hair long and wild and completely unmanageable." Horst was apparently unconcerned about the hair. The photographs were extraordinary. He asked her back. Then he asked her back again. She became his favourite model, and Horst introduced her to the entire ecosystem of European fashion photography. The career that was never supposed to happen had begun. The Photographers, the Poses, and the Nudes Over the following two decades, Lisa Fonssagrives worked with virtually every significant fashion photographer of the era. George Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Erwin Blumenfeld, George Platt Lynes, Richard Avedon, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Norman Parkinson, and eventually Irving Penn all shot her repeatedly. Many of them produced what contemporaries considered the finest work of their careers while she stood in front of their lenses. Her background in dance gave her something most models simply didn't have: a total, instinctive command of her own body in space. She knew how light fell, how weight shifted, how a shoulder could change the entire meaning of a pose. She described herself as "a form in space." Photographers described her as something closer to a collaborator. "It was a kind of game, that exchange that takes place through the lens," she said in an interview with BOMB magazine. "That is why I hate the word 'shooting.' It implies something so one-sided and impersonal. It was never a 'shooting,' but a sitting or a seance." That collaborative instinct extended to the more daring work. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, between the Paris fashion collections, she and Fernand travelled Europe selling photographs to magazines across the continent, including nudes, sports shots, and nature work. The nude photography was artistic rather than exploitative, rooted in her dancer's comfort with the body as a subject, but it was frank. She knew what she was doing and she did it with the same precision she brought to a Balenciaga gown. Later, with Horst P. Horst, she posed for a celebrated series of graceful nudes that are regularly described by critics as being among the finest examples of the form. Horst was a photographer she trusted completely. According to contemporaries, she trusted Horst so much that the nude work came as naturally as anything else. Fernand, her photographer husband, also shot nudes of her. The resulting images sit in the same tradition as the great art nude photography of the period, formal and elegant, entirely devoid of anything exploitative. A Vogue features editor named Allene Talmey captured the attitude behind it all neatly. "Though often dressed to the nines," Talmey wrote, "Fonssagrives was a barefoot soul who liked to swim in the nude. She was comfortable enough in her well-toned, slender body to bare all before the camera, daringly sunbathing naked at the edge of a cliff; or pensive and fragile behind a harp's long strings." The waist that features in those images was described by contemporaries as measurable at seventeen inches when cinched. It was the body of a trained dancer, not a model, which was precisely why the models of the era couldn't replicate what she did. The Eiffel Tower Photograph In May 1939, Erwin Blumenfeld was commissioned to shoot the cover of French Vogue for a special issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Eiffel Tower. The resulting photograph is one of the most famous fashion images ever taken, and it very nearly required Lisa Fonssagrives to be utterly fearless. Blumenfeld took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower and photographed her in a flowing Lucien Lelong dress, reportedly unharnessed, holding onto a high iron strut with one hand while her dress billowed dramatically into the Paris skyline below. The city stretched out behind her. The image is simultaneously breathtaking and vertiginous. When asked later if she'd been terrified, she was dismissive. "No, I was too young and too strong," she said. "I was a dancer and a skier and very athletic." Blumenfeld, she recalled, "was marvellous. He made you feel so beautiful. He used to hold my face in his hands like some fragile flower, so gentle, to pose it in the right light." The photograph was published just months before Germany invaded Poland and the world that produced it ceased to exist. Blumenfeld himself would be interned in France as an enemy alien before eventually escaping to the United States. The Eiffel Tower image became, in retrospect, a kind of last photograph of a certain kind of Paris. War, America, and the Making of a Supermodel When war was declared in September 1939, Lisa and Fernand were on their way back from a Swedish vacation. They made a decision that would define the next chapter of her life: they emigrated to America. Fernand began shooting for Town and Country. Lisa, arriving in New York, found herself immediately in demand from the community of exiled European photographers who'd made the same journey. Horst was there. Blumenfeld was there. The whole world of European fashion photography had been relocated to Manhattan, and it recognised her immediately. Through the 1940s, her face was everywhere. Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Life, Town and Country, the original Vanity Fair. She appeared on Vogue covers eleven times between 1940 and 1952, and across the magazine's pages countless more times. She was reportedly earning $40 an hour when most models were receiving between $10 and $25. She received sacks of fan mail, which she found more alarming than gratifying given her fundamental shyness. Then, in September 1949, she became the first fashion model in history to appear on the cover of Time magazine. The headline called her the "Billion Dollar Baby," a reference to her power to move the spending of American women. The accompanying article described her as "the highest-paid, highest-praised high-fashion model in the business, considered by many of her colleagues the greatest fashion model of all time." She'd appeared on more Vogue covers than any other model in history. Three generations of American women, it was said, recognised her face as readily as they'd recognise the Mona Lisa. She described herself as a good clothes hanger. Irving Penn and the Greatest Fashion Partnership in History In 1947, at a photoshoot for American Vogue, photographer Irving Penn assembled the twelve most successful models of the moment for a portrait he titled '12 Beauties.' Lisa Fonssagrives was one of them. Penn placed her at the centre. It would take two more years and a Paris haute couture shoot before the professional relationship became something else entirely. The story of Lisa Fonssagrives and Irving Penn is one of fashion's great love stories, and like a lot of love stories, it complicated everything. She was still technically married to Fernand. Penn was one of the most celebrated photographers working. By 1949, the Paris shoot had made something clear to both of them. She divorced Fernand that same year. She and Penn married in 1950. Lisa Fonssagrives and Irving Penn What followed was forty-two years together, during which Penn shot some of the most celebrated fashion and portrait images of the twentieth century, often with Lisa as his subject. Penn himself said of the marriage on their fortieth anniversary: "Each day is an enrichment." When she died in 1992, he told the press they had represented "an extraordinary relationship between a photographer and a model." He outlived her by seventeen years. The photographs Penn made of Lisa are among the finest examples of fashion photography as art. There's a 1950 print of her that sold at auction in 2004, as part of Elton John's photography collection at Christie's, for over $57,000. A 1950 image sold in 2011 for $131,450. She was, in Penn's lens, both his muse and his most precisely understood subject. The Exit Nobody Saw Coming Lisa Fonssagrives effectively retired from modelling in 1952, after the birth of her son Tom Penn. She was 41. In an industry that still routinely disposes of women in their twenties, she'd lasted at the top for sixteen years, and the decision to leave appears to have cost her nothing in terms of emotional investment. "I was a sculptor all my life," she said later. "I was a form in space." She spent the mid-1950s designing clothes. At first it was the odd dress made for one of Irving's advertising campaigns, but word spread. People began commissioning evening gowns. She found herself designing a line of leisurewear for Lord and Taylor, then sportswear. This lasted about six years, until a building move made running a design operation from her apartment impossible. She stopped, apparently without regret, and turned back to what she'd wanted to do since childhood. In the 1960s, she enrolled in the Art Students League to sharpen her drawing. She set up a sculpture studio in the couple's Long Island house. She began exhibiting in group shows in 1968 and progressed to solo exhibitions. She was eventually represented by the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan, one of the most prestigious galleries in the world, exhibiting sculptures in marble, bronze, and fibreglass. In 1986, she had a solo show there. Three years after her death, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm held a retrospective dedicated to her sculptural work, and the Penn family donated a collection of her sculptures and watercolours to the museum. Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Condé Nast, who knew her for decades, described her as "a real artist." So did Priscilla Rattazzi, who photographed her later in life. "She was gorgeous, and incredibly classy," Rattazzi said. "And there was clearly a strong bond between her and Penn. But most importantly, she was a real artist." She'd never claimed otherwise. A Legacy Bigger Than Fashion Lisa Fonssagrives died of pneumonia in New York on 4 February 1992, aged 80. She left behind a husband who'd spent forty-two years photographing her, two children who both went into design and art, a body of sculptural work serious enough to earn museum retrospectives, and a modelling career that had essentially defined the concept of what a supermodel could be before anyone had bothered to coin the term. What she didn't leave behind was any obvious desire to be remembered for the modelling. She'd done it well, made good money at it, worked with extraordinary people, and then moved on. The contrast with the culture of celebrity that followed is hard to miss. Gisele Bündchen, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell. All of them came after. None of them appeared on more Vogue covers. None of them preceded her in appearing on the cover of Time. And none of them, it's fair to say, followed their modelling careers by securing representation at the Marlborough Gallery and donating sculptures to national museums. A photographer once asked her to model some hats. She was terribly shy but flattered. She arrived for the test shoot in a homemade suit with unmanageable hair, and she'd never looked at a fashion magazine in her life. Sixteen years later, she was the most famous face in the world. A few years after that, she was a sculptor. "I was a form in space," she said. She wasn't wrong. Sources 1. Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn Interview, BOMB Magazine, 1985 2. Both Artist and Muse: The Life of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Vogue Scandinavia 3. Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Svenska kvinnobiografiskt lexikon (SKBL) 4. The Profile That Changed the Fashion World, Modig 5. Lisa Fonssagrives: Three Decades of Classic Fashion Photography, Martin Harrison (book) 6. Erwin Blumenfeld, Osborne Samuel Gallery 7. Lisa Fonssagrives, RoGallery 8. Lisa Fonssagrives, Wikipedia 9. Lisa Fonssagrives and Marion Cotillard: Eiffel Tower Above Them All, Fashionista 10. Lisa Fonssagrives, Blue 17 Vintage Clothing

In 1996, Chilean journalist Nancy Guzmán knocked on a door on Bremen Street in the Ñuñoa district of Santiago. She was there to interview one of the most feared women in the history of Pinochet's dictatorship. The woman who answered was heavyset, with large hands, a hoarse voice, and a cigarette. She was wearing a floral skirt and a handmade sweater. She lived completely alone. No children, no husband. And lodged in her skull, a bullet that had been there for fifteen years. This was Íngrid Felicitas Olderöck Bernhard, known throughout Chile simply as La Mujer de los Perros: the Woman of the Dogs. During the years of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, she had been the most prominent woman inside the DINA, Chile's feared secret police. Survivors of Chile's clandestine detention centres placed her among the most brutal torturers of the entire regime. A German Upbringing with Nazi Sympathies Olderöck was born on September 14, 1943, in Santiago, to a German immigrant family that had arrived in Chile in 1925. The household was strictly isolated from Chilean society. She and her sisters were not permitted to speak Spanish at home or to have Chilean friends. The ideology that surrounded her childhood was openly fascist. She later told Guzmán: "I've been a Nazi since I was little, since I learned that the best period that Germany lived was when the Nazis were in power, when there was work and tranquility and there were no shameless thieves." In later life, when her parents died, Olderöck took it upon herself to have her older sister tortured and raped in order to seize the inheritance. She joined the Carabineros, Chile's national police force, and distinguished herself quickly. She became the first woman to qualify as a paratrooper in Chile, and indeed in all of Latin America, a distinction she was reportedly proud of for the rest of her life. When Pinochet's coup overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Olderöck's trajectory changed decisively. She was recruited almost immediately into the newly formed DINA, the Directorate of National Intelligence, and assigned to its Brigada Purén, one of the units responsible for murders and disappearances. The Most Powerful Woman in the Secret Police Within the DINA, Olderöck rose to become the most prominent female operative in the organisation. She was given responsibility for training detachments of young women to work as agents against political opponents of the regime. She also had unusual access across the network of clandestine detention centres that DINA ran in and around Santiago, including Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38, and the one that became most closely associated with her name: Venda Sexy. Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38 Venda Sexy was a two-storey house in the middle-class Macul district of Santiago. Its name, given by the agents themselves, reflected the methods used there. Music was played at full volume around the clock to drown out the sounds from inside. The 2004 Valech Commission report, which documented over 27,000 cases of political imprisonment and torture under Pinochet, described it as one of the most systematically brutal facilities in the entire network. Survivors' accounts describe a structured timetable of abuse, with sessions planned and scheduled like a working day. The Accusations That Defined Her Reputation The testimony that gave Olderöck her nickname came from survivors of these detention centres, who accused her of training German Shepherd dogs, including one named Volodia, to rape female prisoners during interrogation sessions. The accusations were presented to the United Nations by Amnesty International, and they appear in survivor testimony collected by human rights investigators over several decades. Venda Sexy Olderöck denied everything. In her conversations with Guzmán and in subsequent legal proceedings, she refused to accept any involvement in the abuses documented at Venda Sexy, Villa Grimaldi, or elsewhere. She disputed her presence at key events and challenged the credibility of the witnesses against her. She was never convicted. Despite the weight of survivor testimony and the findings of the Valech Commission, she died without ever being held legally accountable for what she was accused of. Shot in the Head and Still Refusing Anaesthetic By the late 1970s, Pinochet had dissolved the DINA and replaced it with the CNI, a successor agency considered somewhat more restrained in its methods if not its goals. Olderöck's operational role ended. But her troubles were far from over. On July 15, 1981, two militants from the MIR, the Revolutionary Left Movement that had been driven into exile after the coup and had since returned to Chile clandestinely, shot her at close range. She survived. When she was taken to hospital, she refused anaesthetic. Her reasoning, according to Guzmán's account, was rooted in her knowledge of DINA's own interrogation methods, where drugs and sedatives had been used to extract information from or disorient detainees. She didn't trust the medical staff and didn't want to be rendered unconscious. The bullet was left in her head. She carried it there for the remaining twenty years of her life. There was a secondary concern. Prior to the shooting, Olderöck had been attending therapy sessions, during which she may have disclosed sensitive information about DINA's operations. Her former colleagues had reason to be nervous. Whether the shooting was purely the work of MIR militants or had any DINA involvement was never established, but the suspicion was enough to deepen the paranoia that surrounded the rest of her life. Alone on Bremen Street When Guzmán found her in 1996, Olderöck was living in complete isolation. The woman who had once commanded fear across Santiago's network of detention facilities had no family around her, no community, and no apparent remorse. She spoke to Guzmán across three sessions in July and August of that year, initially as part of research for a BBC documentary. The resulting book, Ingrid Olderöck: La Mujer de los Perros, published in 2014, remains the most detailed account of her life and crimes. Guzmán described her as the most powerful and brutal woman in the DINA. In the interviews, Olderöck spoke freely about her ideology but maintained her denials about the specific abuses. She died on March 17, 2001, in Santiago, from a gastric haemorrhage, alone. She was 57. Bestia: An Oscar Nomination From the Shadows In 2022, Chilean director Hugo Covarrubias released a stop-motion animated short film called Bestia, inspired by Olderöck's story and drawing on Guzmán's book. The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Animated Short Film category, bringing renewed international attention to a chapter of Chilean history that the country is still working through. Covarrubias has been careful to describe the film as inspired by rather than strictly biographical, but its impact reopened public debate in Chile about accountability, memory, and the many perpetrators of the dictatorship who lived out their days without facing justice. Olderöck's story sits at a particularly uncomfortable intersection: a woman who rose higher in a brutal patriarchal institution than almost any other female operative, using methods that disproportionately targeted other women. She was a product of an ideology she'd absorbed before she was old enough to question it, and she apparently never did question it. She died in 2001, alone in that Santiago house, a bullet still in her skull and not a single conviction to her nam Sources 1. Nancy Guzmán, Ingrid Olderöck: La Mujer de los Perros (Ceibo Ediciones, 2014) 2. Valech Commission Report (National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture), Chile, 2004 3. Wikipedia: Ingrid Olderock – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Olderock 4. The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/bestia-oscar-nominated-film-exposes-how-the-powerful-in-chile-still-dont-pay-for-human-rights-abuses-177562 5. Venceremos Chile: https://venceremoschile.wordpress.com/2017/11/12/ingrid-olderock-la-mujer-de-los-perros/ 6. Ramona Wadi book review: https://ramonawadi.com/2018/12/01/book-review-ingrid-olderock-la-mujer-de-los-perros-2/ 7. Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Ingrid_Olderock