All week long, as we close out 2017, Juxtapoz is looking back at some of our most popular and most-read stories on Juxtapoz.com. We have done a review of all our cover stories, looked at Lucy Sparrow's uber-popular pop-up installation in NYC, and today, we look at the classic Salvador Dali collaboration with the famed magazine. This article was originally published on June 2, 2017.
For his photo shoot for Playboy magazine, Salvador Dali, long-time Playboy photographer Pompeo Posar, a gaggle of Playboy Bunnies and a giant egg headed to Cadaqués, a seaside town in Spain near where Dali lived in Port Lligat, a small village on a bay next to the town.
The event would turn the sleepy village upside down during the shoot and local Dali-devotees would wait outside his home so that they could pay homage to the Surrealist by chanting “Master! Master!” whenever he left the residence to go to work under the blistering hot Spanish sun.
“The meaning of my work is the motivation that is of the purest – money. What I did for Playboy is very good and your payment is equal to the task.”
—Salvador Dali on his collaboration with Playboy in 1973
Working closely with Posar, Dali created a few sketches of his vision for the shoot which ultimately ended up including a giant egg, an equally fake large snake, various collage images that ran the gamut from a Coca-Cola bottle to Renaissance-style architecture, and of course, Playboy Bunnies cavorting around wearing little to nothing because this is Playboy magazine we’re talking about. Dali—who was 69 at the time—ran the shoot like the master that he was and residents of Cadaqués would watch the artist’s every move from the hills surrounding the location.
The final photos live up to Dali’s provocative, boundary-pushing style, and are gorgeously bizarre to behold. I’ve included a few of Dali’s preliminary sketches that detail part of his artistic vision for the shoot and many others including the master at work, as well as the finished product that appeared in the December 1974 issue of Playboy.
Pretty much all of them are NSFW. But you hate your stupid desk job anyway, don’t you?
via Dangerous Minds
