Post #428723 by bigbrotiki on Wed, Jan 14, 2009 11:31 AM

The genre of Tahitian photo books is one of my favorites examples of National Geographic eroticism. I own only three of these tourist mementos, and unfortunately none have those pictures in them:

I used several images from these in "Tiki Modern". Leeteg was known to copy his paintings from other photographers, one of them even sued him successfully for that. I forgot if it was Sylvain, the most famous of the Tahiti photographers,

...who was also an accomplished cinematographer, aiding among other things in producing footage for the Fox TV series "Adventures in Paradise" (Tiki Modern p.102). He was married to a beautiful Tahitian dancer, and their son Teva has since taken up the tradition of providing nude wahine imagery for the Tahitian tourist market in calendars, postcards and photo books --he obviously saw a good thing when he had one:

Oh, should I have included a "nudity" warning at the beginning? Oh well, too late now. :)