The Naked Truth About Harrison Marks

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Understandably, Marks kept My Slasher Friend’s real name out of the book, though a likely suspect is Billy Hill, the self-proclaimed “Boss of Britain’s Underworld”, who ran protection rackets in the West End and whose trademark was carving the letter ‘V’ into the faces of rival gangsters. The portrayal of Marks himself within the pages of the early Kamera issues now seems rather self-consciously serious and respectable, with Marks coming across like a scholarly, professor type who refers to his pictures as “nude studies”, and in his editorials is prone to such goatee-stroking poetic statements as “purely by interpretation of the artist, a model can be made to appear as a Venus, capturing every point in classical beauty of the human form”, all a far cry from the sweary, former music hall act he really was, or the sort of saucy humour he would later wed nudity to in his work.

The Mummy was a fun and scary movie, I was a slave girl and I get caught by the Mummy and laid on a slab.

Airbrushed fannies or not, such was Kamera’s continued success that by the early 60s the magazine boasted a loyal staff of around seventeen “around me, I have grouped a staff, not so much working on an employer/employee basis, but as good friends working together for the good of the magazine”, wrote Marks in Kamera no. No, the line came from a little known actress named Donna Selby, who National Spotlite scribe Hugh Wells interviewed in London. In another, Model Entry (1965), a cat burglar breaks into Marks' studio, strips and leaves him her address.

Naturally, many of Marks' photos were airbrushed upon publication but most of these present are from original negatives, without retouching. His feature films as a director were Naked - As Nature Intended (1961), The Chimney Sweeps (his only non-sex feature, 1963), The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1967), Pattern of Evil (1967), The Nine Ages of Nakedness (1969) and Come Play With Me (1977), which featured Mary Millington.Harrison Marks’ family were a tight-knit Jewish community under the control of a domineering Aunt, a woman dubbed within the family circle “Sergeant Major”. While his earlier 8mm films largely consisted of nothing more explicit than the models posing topless, late-sixties titles like Apartment 69 and The Amorous Masseur were generally softcore sex affairs.