Interview with Robert Stewart, the Archivist of Delta of Venus (NSFW)

​Robert Stewart has collected vintage erotica & ephemera (photos, movies, art, writing) since 2002. Robert is the proprietor and archivist of DeltaofVenus.com, an online subscription-based archive of historical erotica. As well as collecting, Robert does his own restoration & digital transfers of erotic historical media - especially antique newsreels, and early 20th century photos.
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When he's not curating and one of the largest repositories of online historic erotica, Rob enjoys consulting, gardening, and social work. You can find Robert peddling smut & history at various online locales like Twitter at @Delta_ofVenus.

1: How did you start collecting vintage pornography? ​

It started as a chance find of erotic photos at an estate sale. That gave me the treasure-hunting bug that comes with this hobby because they were literally tucked in a corner somewhere in an unmarked bag or cardboard box. Any collector – of anything really – knows how addictive that endorphin kick can be.

In college, I used some of that material as a springboard for projects examining antique erotica as a form of “folk art”. There was lot of curiosity and intrigue about the collection even then, which got the gears turning about how I could present it publicly someday.

Afterwards college, I lived in Portland, Oregon, and have to give a shout-out to a wonderful underground book/zine/smut shop there called Counter Media. They had not only thousands of smut mags from the 1940s through the 70s, but binders packed with antique erotica for sale from both nineteenth & twentieth centuries. It was such a great store, and a sad casualty of the recent gentrification wave that's swept the city, which is a real drag because there are so few places like it, anywhere. Being able to browse & purchase that stuff via retail in my area was a huge help. I probably owe them the most for getting the collection rolling.
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Learning how to work with and restore film reels & projectors, do digital transfers, etc, came a bit later. That was the final key to starting Delta of Venus.

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2: Do you regard Delta of Venus as a pornographic site or an educational one?

Oh, it's “entertainment” first-and-foremost; i.e. pornography.

Porn is a limited term though. The connotation is that it's a genre with no depth or interest beyond getting you off. Which is a worthy goal in itself, but I feel like it's a missed opportunity especially regarding a subject as layered as sexuality.

I try to present the DOV collection with context (historical and otherwise), keep it friendly & approachable, and maybe, most importantly, respect the intelligence of the viewer. It's intended to be more celebratory than taboo, and offer a little more to the curious than just the naughty bits if they're inclined to learn about it.
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So, I'm 'meh' about the word “porn”. “Erotica” has its own connotations too – sophisticated or aspiring to art, which isn't necessarily a prerequisite for being enjoyable. “Smut” is better I think, because it encompasses the range of the collection from relatively tame to highly explicit, plus there's a bit of kitsch to that word and kitsch is a running theme through the collection.

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3: Much of the feedback I get from the vintage images on WoY is from people who are really surprised to see bodies that are hairy, wobbly and unedited – do you have a similar reaction from your viewers?

Goes with the territory, especially with broader audiences like Twitter. While doing WoY, like me you've probably heard every possible variation of 'OMG! TRIM THAT BUSH' anytime a woman with pubic hair is posted. That one strikes a chord for whatever reason. Hair is maybe a more powerful image than we give credit for!

4: Many people contact me to say thank you for posting vintage images and that it helps them to feel more confident about their own bodies – do you think that vintage pornography can actually be empowering to people today?

Sure. Once you go back a generation or two, you're not going to see the Photoshopped bodies we're bombarded with today. It's not just that the women featured back then are always plumper or less athletic – you just see a lot of different shapes & proportions as in real life, rather than the standardised bust-waist-hip ratio that's ubiquitous today. Beauty – actual aesthetic physical beauty, not just “on the inside” - comes in so many forms and I think we give short shrift to that today, we've kind of homogenised it to a pretty narrow template.
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So yeah, vintage erotica broadens that palette and can feel empowering to people turned off by those modern standards.

That being said - history can't always lay claim to more enlightened beauty standards, other eras had their own issues. Tight laced corsets weren't ideal for the wearer's health, and there were occasions through the seventeenth-nineteenth centuries where it was common. Foot-binding in China was almost universal for upper-class women at one point in the 1800s and a big part of their cultural sex appeal.

There are lots of these examples. Sometimes I wonder whether our current narrowing beauty standards are more a blip rather than a long-term trend. Maybe in a generation we'll look back on the aesthetics of artificiality from, say, 1995-2025, and think they're just as quaint as hoop-skirts and bustles. Or maybe we'll all wind up hairless cyborgs. Toss-up?

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5: Who is your favourite vintage pin up model?

Definitely a “do I have to pick one?” question.

Bettie Page is an obvious choice - she had that magic touch of coming across simultaneously sultry and approachable, sometimes almost wholesome, often while dressed in full BDSM gear. She was arguably as influential on American subculture fashion as any designer, with an assist from Irving Klaw.

UK model June Palmer is another. I recently shared this quote from glamour photographer Irv Carsten speaking about a session with June: “I felt ashamed using an automatic camera. Her posing is second nature, she's beautiful from any angle, and without camera settings to make, there's nothing to do but watch."

You can see that in June's photos. Not to get too poetic about it, but she's simultaneously the subject and the master.

It goes beyond physical beauty or prolific modelling. These women had a genius in front of the camera – able to convey an alluring fantasy alongside glimpses of genuine soul (for lack of a better term). They had a certain physical naturalism even when posing, as though dancing but frozen in a specific moment instead. You can immediately recognise that ja ne sais quoi when you see it.
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It's really an art form IMO, one that we're losing in the video era (and beyond). So I appreciate the contemporary models & photographers who are still carrying that torch, still some great stuff being made today.

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6: I am often asked for more images of people of colour, but I always struggle to find them. Do you have similar problems and why do you think this is?

It's no secret that minorities are poorly represented in the historical record overall – economics, prejudice, available technology, etc.

As you've noticed it's especially tough to find erotica featuring people of color from the nineteenth century. The closest you usually get are the Orientalist genre of postcards – basically semi “academic” photos depicting nude women from North Africa, Middle East, Asia, etc, as exotic beauties. Many of them are lovely but they absolutely have a sort of voyeur-colonialist feel in hindsight.

I have a handful of XXX films from the 1920s & 1930s that feature either interracial or all-black casts, so they're out there. Some are fun & seem far ahead of their time, others feel pretty exploitative – I try to stick with the former. It can be a fine line.

However there were some fantastic & quite popular black or Latina pin-ups & adult stars in the 1970s – Sylvia McFarland, Desiree West, Vanessa Del Rio, to name a few. Vanessa's still very much around .

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​7: Where do you get your material from?

I work with sellers ranging from longtime collectors of fine art to folks who've inherited the porn stash of their estranged great-uncle, and everything in-between. For DOV, I also collaborate with original producers, publishers, and photographers of past eras, to round out the collection especially for the later 1960s & 70s stuff.
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A lot of earlier erotic art is in the public domain. That's a great resource especially for people just dipping their toe in the water – quite a bit of it's ended up on the internet in some form or another over the last ten years.

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8: As of 2018, in the UK, new censorship laws will prohibit adults accessing content deemed to be ‘pornographic’ without ‘proving’ their age first. Does this kind of censorship concern you and your project?

It's ridiculous. It's concerning from a livelihood perspective because a lot of DOV's subscribers are in the UK, but it goes so far beyond that. Whether we're talking about educational & public health sites being blocked or just the further stigmatisation of sexuality, I'm amazed we're at this point. In general, the world's gotten very strange very quickly.

9: What do you think we can learn from vintage erotica?

I think any history (especially social & cultural history) is a great tool for discovering parallels in our own time. Because we're looking back through the years with some personal distance we tend to see things a little more clearly, stuff that today would be cluttered and obscured by our own notions. So by looking at historical erotica & sex we maybe get a better understanding of the hows & whys of modern sexuality too.
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Beyond that - being sexy, beautiful, fun, evocative, etc, are pretty decent goals themselves.

10: As old erotica was not subject to models over 18 only, I am constantly terrified about accidentally posting an image of someone who is underage – do you also worry about this and what checks do you have in place to make sure you don’t?

For newer material – 1950s and up – I research the participants & sources, usually through some combo of the seller/producer if possible and then the vintage smut community as a whole. There are some amazing folks (for example at the VEF) who've made it one of the main pastimes to catalogue and taxonomize erotica of the past, and they usually have a pretty good answer. At this point, most the material that should be red-flagged to some extent already has been identified.
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For older material, sometimes you can cross reference other images with the same model and in rare cases identify them outside the context of erotica, but it's hazy.

​ If there's any doubt at all, don't use it. It's as simple as that. I've come across plenty of material that I skipped on because of this, even though it probably was fine.