Anthropology & Sam Haskins

‘Have you ever seen a first edition of Sam Haskins’s Five Girls or Cowboy Kate & Other Stories signed by one of the models?’ I asked a veteran Johannesburg bookseller.

‘Never,’ he declared with conviction. There wasn’t one on the Internet either. ‘If you lay your hands on a copy, you could have a really nice item for your photographic book collection,’ he encouraged me. 

It was the mid 2000s and I was on a pilgrimage to the London bookshops. I had tea with the Harringtons, was shown the Africana section in the back room at Maggs Bros. Ltd. and was invited to a cocktail party at Sotheran’s. I felt like nothing less than African royalty. Up until that point, Robyn Fryde from Thorold’s bookshop had been the only one representing the book trade from the Southern tip, so I imagine I was a curiosity of sorts. All the luminaries were extremely friendly and hospitable, and I was full of the spice of book dealing.

It was with that hype that I attended an old school friend’s drinks party in South Kensington. I remember the late evening light bestowed on that wonderland. We were gathered on the balcony of a Georgian townhouse. Like books on a shelf, there was a row of these townhouses, all identical and painted crisp white with the iron work highlighted in black enamel. We overlooked a manicured private park. I could live here, I thought! Magically, the twilight lingered for hours. Streeks of vapour trails criss-crossed the sky from transiting aircraft.

I was instructed to up my game, dress up and conform to the rites of that tribe. Very detailed dress-code instructions were given. I wore a white, tailored, Egyptian cotton shirt with Victorian, Scottish Agate cuff links. My trousers were tailored flannels of fine charcoal wool.

You see, back in Johannesburg, I had never had occasion to dress in such a manner and my host knew this. In Africa’s greatest book-selling city, if I attended an upmarket event, I would merely tuck my versatile Woolworths shirt into my Stuttaford’s trousers. To be more formal, I would maybe polish my Caterpillar shoes. We are the progeny of a mining town and some things linger, like the utility of functional clothing.

However, I was then in London and some of the guests were of the gentry class, I was informed in hushed tones. I suppose my friend did not want to be seen to be associated with yet another uncouth immigrant. And so it was gently advised that, so as not to betray my pedestrian pedigree, I scrub up a bit. I embraced this new persona with enthusiasm. I noticed that some of my fellow sons-of-colonists had gone so far as to take on the airs and graces of the very gentry I was to encounter. It certainly can be a slippery slope of temptation when one gets sucked into the mercurial vortex of that capital of the book-dealing world.

The party ended with great success. I was at the door talking to the host, as the guests were leaving. One tall beauty caught my eye. She had ink-black hair and Secretary Bird-like eyelashes. She strode up to my friend and bent forward. ‘Ah, darling, thank you so much for a lovely evening,’ she declared, her voice rich with confidence and class. They air-kissed each other on both cheeks and, with the grace of an Impala, she navigated her way down the stairs on her high-heeled shoes.

‘Wow, she’s a honey,’ I stated.

‘Yes, sure is. I know what you are thinking and the answer is, yes, she’s single, but you’ve no chance.’

‘And why’s that?’ I interrogated my friend of two decades.

‘You never went to Oxford or Cambridge. Besides, you’re from the colonies.’ Appreciating his honesty, I shrugged my shoulders. There was a pause. ‘She’s the daughter of one of the models from Five Girls.’ He tossed me a throwaway comment.

‘What? The Sam Haskins book?’

‘Yip’.

‘You’ve seen my photography book collection. You remembered!’ Back in the day, I had an entire case of books in my shop dedicated to photography and probably the same number in my own collection. And I think I was more surprised that someone had actually remembered seeing my books than anything else. ‘No ways.’ My mind began computing.

‘Anyway, like I said, no point in trying. She’s out of your league.’

That night, while in bed, I replayed the evening’s events. I made up my mind. My objective for the next day would be to find at least one of Sam Haskins’s large photo books. Haskins had ended up in London later in his career. I’d read so much about the London trade and, now, here I was – a pilgrim who’d finally gone on Haj. Over the following ten days, I went to Cecil Court and mused over those tiny hole-in-the-wall-like bookshops, so thematically specialised they cater to the periphery of the trade. For example, a shop full of Victorian children’s books or first-editions of early-twentieth-century Modernist novels, and so on. We, in Johannesburg, had to be generalists to survive. Our small market could never support such specialisation. But it’s these specialists that are so interesting. Like an intricate ecosystem, they contribute to the greater fabric of the trade.

I was aghast to come to the realisation that, on a dealer’s table at the Olympia Fair, was an inventory valued at no less than a couple of million Pounds Sterling – a staggering sum of money to me. The cheapest book displayed on the table would sell for ten times the value of the entire inventory in my shop! There weren’t any photography books on offer. They were yet to realise those kinds of values.

For those of you who missed the 1960s and ’70s craze of collecting Sam Haskins photographic books, let me fill you in. Sam Haskins was a thick-bearded character who wore wide-framed spectacles, which, today, are considered out of fashion for any man barring pioneers of the ultra-avant-garde. But, at the time of publication, this look was seriously hip.

Haskins used the grainy photographic technique to great effect. One way this was achieved, was to shoot with a high ISO and use a shorter exposure. In short, he was a master of his craft and highly accomplished in his genre of photography. It’s amazing to think that mobile phone cameras do this all automatically these days.

Not in keeping with the stereotype of a sexual revolutionary of the photographic medium, our protagonist was born in Kroonstad in 1929. This one-horse town is actually named after a horse! Yes, that is correct. Kroonstad is the only town in South Africa to be named after one of our closest four-legged friends. ‘Kroon’ was his name because of the crown-like hair style he sported. He passed away while crossing a drift and, in so doing, became memorialised by 19th-century travellers transiting into the interior of South Africa – from ‘Kroonsdrift’ to ‘Kroonstad’.

One-horse towns and award-winning photographers are not usually references made in the same sentence, but Haskins was all that. He was arguably the best-known South African photographer of his generation in the 1960s. Remember, this was a time of stars on nipples and deeply conservative verkrampte National Party policies. The publication and distribution of images of topless women was stickly forbidden. Scope, the smutty gentleman’s magazine, survived until 1996. It started around the same time that Cowboy Kate & Other Stories was published, but had black censor-mark stars placed strategically over the parts of the female anatomy that the censors deemed immoral. Scope openly marketed itself as soft porn and was the vanguard of freedom and the open distribution of images of naked women in conservative South Africa.

‘What is it about Cowboy Kate and Five Girls that make them so popular?’ I asked an anthropologist customer of mine.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘to begin with, all of them are women of child-bearing age, so, in this sense, they appeal to heterosexual men. Then, there’s the availability signalling. The ladies are scantily clad and are in poses that indirectly invite a sexual response. Their open-mouthed expressions trigger an invitation to sex. For instance, in the case of Scope magazine, the bright red lipstick is a genital echo. Because humans have been covering their genitalia for so many generations, a full-lipped women who has applied red lipstick is the equivalent of a red- bummed female baboon in estrus inviting sexual intercourse.’

So, in the eyes of an anthropologist, Sam Haskins’s photography books are neuron-triggering devices for aspirant polyamorous-minded men to fantasise about having sexual relations with other women.

‘And just because Haskins was able to pass off these books as art, they bypassed the censors?’

‘Exactly! That’s what I think.’ He nodded his head. ‘It’s like Scope, but different’.

Many editions of Haskins’s coffee-table books were printed. Yes, you heard me right – they were sold as photographic art and deemed respectable for all liberal, forward-thinking South African homes. ‘Look at his mastery of chiaroscuro,’ I heard an aficionado declare. The magic was that Haskins clouded the issue of pornography by throwing in photographs of triple-exposed pot plants, blurred shutters, over-exposed torsos, half a child’s doll and other still-life-like distractions that clearly blurred the censor’s critical eye. Like a fox in a chase, he brilliantly threw the censors off his scent.

Most pornography at the time was in colour. Haskins developed in monochrome. The critics acclaimed this as retrospective and sophisticated. His models were never in poses that could be directly associated with sexual invitation. They were engaged in navel gazing and flower sniffing. One topless model stands beside a bottle filled with paint brushes. It’s like she’s in a baroque pose of indifference. Another photograph might be described as a playful post-coital scene. The models establish a familiarity with the viewer, reacting to a conversation, laughing at a joke.

‘Our brains play tricks on us,’ my anthropologist customer reminded me. An owner of one of these books might page through it regularly, like an old friend, and subconsciously satisfy the brain’s primordial lust to have multiple sexual partners. And for this reason, most of Haskins’s books are well thumbed through. I struggled to find copies in good condition in London. Most book sellers had never even heard of Haskins.

I ended up ordering two first editions in acceptable condition from the Durban-based book seller, Dennis Slotow of ABC Bookshop, who couriered them to London. The two beauties arrived in time. One was even signed by Haskins. My heart raced a little as I paged through them, oh so carefully. I did not want to add my thumb print to the pages. They were to become the defining copies. This is what we dealers do – add value by getting people associated with the book to sign it. In my collection, I would own the only known copies, blah blah…

I was so proud of myself. Here I was in London and doing my first book deal. It was the night of the next cocktail party – this time in Knightsbridge. I donned my tailored shirt, stood in front of the mirror and dusted off my Yves Saint Laurent jacket as I turned from side to side. My flannel trousers were neatly pressed. I was fanatical about conforming to the fashion of the day. I’d assimilated. You can take a South African out of the bush, etc. etc. …

The plan was to discreetly sneak the two Haskins books into the townhouse in a plain white plastic bag. My host might chastise me for mixing business with pleasure. These were tomes at 36cm x 28cm and hardly inconspicuous, so I left them by the coat rack in the entrance hall of the Knightsbridge townhouse. Barbour jackets, fox-hunting prints and silver-hilted walking canes decorated the space.

I greeted my host and scanned the room. There she was, gorgeous in an ivory cocktail dress. Her ample head of hair taken up to expose her long slim Nefertiti-like neck. Which one of the five girls was her mother? I suppressed the tendency we males have to look at women as sexual objects when out of context. This was a cocktail party. But let’s not forget, I’d seen her mother naked just moments before while paging through the books in the taxi. 

‘Hi.’ I reached out to shake her hand. She smiled, I smiled. Her head tilted as if she were questioning whether we’d met before. ‘I’m James. We met a couple of weeks ago in South Ken.’

‘Oh, yes.’ She warmed to me, but I was not convinced that she remembered. Her accent was that of a Sloane Ranger. ‘And how are you?’ She drew out the ‘are’ and the cadence in her voice made me feel welcome.

‘Great. Great, thanks.’ I swayed from side to side. She likes me, I thought. I know she’s single. Do I ask her on a date? No, the books are your mission, that’s the priority. Focus, James. ‘Umm, I believe your mum featured in Sam Haskins’s photographic books.’ Her face melted. There was an awkward silence. ‘And I was hoping that you could maybe get her to sign my two books.’ The last few words of my sentence were mumbled under my breath, for I realised I’d breached some or other social protocol.

‘What!’ She lashed out at me.

‘Ummm, you know, umm, Five Girls and umm.’

‘I cannot believe that you dared ask me that!’ Her gaze was directed at my navel. I realised in that moment that I was the proverbial colonial that had just trespassed.