Quick! Name a 1950s fetish model and the guy who photographed her! My guess is that you’ve responded with Betty Page and Irving Klaw. Well, fine: BP was great, and Klaw has to get a lot of credit for doing what he did, with BP and others, during a time when he risked, and got, criminal prosecution.

    My own choice would be Tana Louise and Lennie Burtman. This a much lesser-known pair, though they’ve become a little more prominent with the reprinting by Taschen of the full run of Exotique magazine. Exotique, for those who don’t know, was a thin fetish magazine with glossy paper and pages a bit larger than what we then called “pocket-books.” It was sold in cellophane wrapping, so that you couldn’t browse through it before buying – which of course added immensely to its erotic appeal. It seemsto have been published irregularly from 1951 through 1959, with 1957 as its peak year. The price was either $2 or $3 – this at a time when Playboy  went for a quarter –  so it seemed like you were acquiring something special. And you were!  Inside were women dressed and posed like nothing I’d seen before – and since.

     The most conspicuously featured woman was Tana Louise, who (I would later learn) was the wife of one of the magazine’s producers, Lennie Burtman. TL seems to have been fairly tall: I’ll guess about 5-7 from a number of sources. She had a full bosom, a tiny waist (made even tinier with one of her many corsets and waist-cinchers), and legs that were…well…a little too thin for my tastes. She also had a curiously   bulbous nose with large flaring nostrils and luscious harp-shaped lips. Unlike Betty, who often looked like the little girl next door playing dress-up, TL was every bit the mature woman, the most fatale of femmes I’ve ever seen.

       And oh that wardrobe! Pumps with 5-inch heels, pumps with 6-inch heels,  platform pumps with heels that must have exceeded 12 inches. Seamed and seamless  stockings, black and flesh-colored, but always full-fashioned. A vast array of corsets and waist-cinchers, opera gloves, and ornate earrings. Leather outfits, skin-tight satin skirts, stylish belts, blouses with billowing sleeves,  luxurious furs and more. I know that Burtman had some money – one issue of Exotique shows TL on a sea voyage to the European fetish-shoppes – and he clearly used a great deal of it to supply TL with a variety of fetish-wear that beats anything I know of. This was a man with a vision, like Klaw, but unlike Klaw, he had a wife with whom it could be realized.

        Most of the photos that went into Exotique seemed to have been taken in a New York luxury apartment – a fitting abode for such a magnificent woman and one which, for me, added considerably to her appeal. Some were astonishingly risqué for the time. One or two actually show her nipples popping out from under a silk blouse. A photo-shoot done with TL and a younger-looking model (Nanette Rockwell) generated shots of Tana dressing-up and then admonishing the younger woman, as if to introduce her to fetishdom, and has lesbian connotations. An outdoor shoot has TL in a leather riding outfit and boots with 5-inch stilettos and razor-sharp spurs; her leather blouse is partly open and she brandishes a riding crop. All this and MUCH more! It’s been over four decades since I last “saw” my beloved Tana, and, to this day, I haven’t seen anyone who could compare.
 
             by Warren   ws1369@aol.com                                                 

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