i stumbled across this familiar ad the other day, and it got me thinking about how the meaning of an image can change over time.
the original photograph, of course, was created by John and Yoko for the sleeve of the first album they recorded together. The album's full title was Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins. The idea was that John and Yoko would chronicle their lives together on a series of recordings, this being the first. Thankfully it also turned out to be the last.
The 'music' - a collage of random sound effects and bodily noises - was always of less interest than the image. The photographs (the image above is one of a pair, the other being a full-frontal) were taken in Ringo's basement in Montague Square by John himself, using delayed a shutter-release. He was too embarrassed, somewhat ironically, to have anyone else take them.
the other Beatles took their time about approving the release of the album on their label, with Paul in particular being opposed to the proposed sleeve, although he ended up contributing a bizarre quote used on the album's cover: 'When two great saints meet it is a humbling experience. The long battles to prove he was a saint." The sardonic (Lennonesque?) tone is a surprise, coming from Paul (it might have been better without the second sentence, which sounds incomplete and makes the whole quote look like something he scribbled down when stoned or drunk, which is not out of the question). That John used it might be interpreted as evidence of a residual if fast-fading ability to laugh at himself, or perhaps as an obscure 'fuck you' to McCartney. The album was eventually released, at the record company's insistence, in a brown paper bag.
the image, shocking at the time, has been rendered so innocuous by the passing of time that it is now judged fit for a mainstream booze brand to shift vodka with. Arguably, then, it achieved what it set out to do: it helped to liberate us from archaic taboos (though we might wonder, as we survey our pornified popular culture, whether or not we've merely swapped prudery for prurience).
but if the image is no longer transgressive in the way it was in 1968, it hasn't lost its power to shock. It just shocks in a different way - in a way that reflects a new taboo. Look at that pallid flesh, untanned and untoned. The pudgy folds, the nobbly legs. Normal bodies, in other words, willingly exposed to the world. It wouldn't be allowed today.
