The Rotenberg Collection is an archive of desire and almost palpable everyday yearning, the fruit of a hundred years of sexual documentation. It is also an alternative social history of the century, one dictated by the body rather than politics. After stumbling across some old pin-up pics in late 70s Brooklyn, Mark Lee Rotenberg started to build the collection that now numbers more than 85,000 erotic photos. Whether faded sepia prints, hand-coloured postcards, 3-D images, magazine cuttings or stills, every item bears witness to the poignant and diverse ways in which displaced gratification is sought.
There is no greater resource than human flesh, but the innocence and simple charm of these pictures, any shock they might have provoked softened by time, lie in the willingness of all involved to free up the possibilities of arousal through the mediums of representation. We see therefore the usual paraphernalia of the fetishistic, the stockings, leather, lace and tools, but the whip's lash is blunted: The women, we might see walking down an everyday street, the fantasies are shared and consensual, the world is given an extra frisson of being, a heightened and stimulating touch of the exotic and risque. This is a collection then for anyone who dreams, anyone who knows the secret electricity of longing.
