The Mammoth Book of Illustrated Erotic Women

The photos are wonderful, artistic, tasteful, innovative but I couldn't enjoy them as I might have. The book is short, narrow and thick which means the photos are too tiny and you can't open the pages enough to see pictures close to the spine.

Had this book been 11X14, I would have awarded 5 stars.

This Mammoth book is actually a little paperback. It's filled with fine examples of fine art nude and erotic photography. It is unfortunate that the photographs could not be presented in a larger setting, so the photographers art could be fully appreciated.

Jakubowski has put together a fine collection of the best nude photography of a number of different photographers from around the world.The only criticism I have of the book is the lack of any photos that have a beach and/or desert background.

Amazingly this is a book full of unclad women and yet the best word to describe the book IMHO is simply dull. Only a couple of the pictures even inspired the thought, 'I wish this person had developed the nebulous idea they originally had'.
Obviously none of the photographers went out of their way to find attractive models to work with and then didn't bother to use any imagination with the ones they picked up.
This book isn't worth the time to flip through if someone gave it to you.

Beautiful nudes, all of them, but rather subdued to anyone looking for serious erotica. The majority of these photos are figure studies, just a simple celebration of women's youthful beauty. Many of the women have pierced this'n'that and many have tattoos, from the demure on up. In some, the marks are just the ones left by the sun or by nature (p.378 - charming!). A few add simple props, like the cover's gauzy scarf. A few others add wit in the form of a piece of fruit (p.450) or a flower (p.380)

For many artists, the erotic comes not just from nudity, but from undress. That genre displays clothes and underclothes in various states of removal. Others see lingerie as decoration in itself, ranging up to stylized, impractical items worn for their play value alone. Along that axis, pictures range from innocent to intense kinds of pinups. The outer ranges of these pictures add moderate bondage, improbably high heels, or other mild fetish elements. A few suggest or show physicality between women or of a woman with herself. The very few pictures that cross over into hard core seem decidedly out of place amid generally tasteful and elegant images.

The models are all lovely, but are all just anonymous models. Other collections assign a name (or at least a pseudonym) to each, an acknowledgement of the person in front of the camera that this collection does not allow. And, as in so many collections, European features, 20-ish and thin, predominate by a large margin. The world has so many other colors, ages, and shapes of beauty that this collection, despite more then 450 pages, comes across as incomplete. Also, I have to wonder how this collection will look in twenty years - skin has always been there, but pierced and inked skin are today's look and that will pass in time. Despite these few flaws, the collection is lovely and enticing, a worthwhile part of any collection of figure photography.

//wiredweird