Venus Passing: Felicity Isabelle Colby 1946-2011

Flick in orbit

The choreographer who gave movement to many of Agent Triple P's adolescent fantasies, Flick Colby, has died at the age of 65.

Flick, centre front and the original group

Born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania in 1946 she moved to London after graduation and formed the Pan's People dance troupe in December 1966 with Dee Dee Wilde.  They first appeared on Top of the Pops in 1968 and were the resident dancers on the UK's top pop music show for the next eight years, performing, usually when an artist couldn't make it into the studio, because they were too American, for example.  

Colby stopped dancing in the group in 1971 to concentrate on the group's choreography.    The group split in April 1976 after their final Top of the Pops performance. Flick stayed with the show as choreographer until 1981 but eventually returned to the US.

Poetry.  In motion.

Other dancers in the group's names still resonate with British men of Agent Triple P's age: Babs, Louise, Ruth Andi and Agent Triple P's favourite, Cherry Gillespie, who joined as an elfin 17 year old in 1972, when original member Ruth left to start a family.

There was much criticism of the literal nature of Pan's People's choreography as it related to the lyrics of the songs, in those pre music video days, but Agent Triple P, and his particular school friends: Snout, Cess, Bean Kid, Jimbo etc, thought they were the pinnacle of terpsichorean talent.  Inthe early seventies when there was very little in the way of suitable lust objects and when short skirts had become an endangered species, just as we were registering girls for the first time, the esteem in which these scantily clad lovelies were held cannot be overestimated.

Flick's picture from the National Portrait Gallery collection

So, thank you Flick for all those jaunty and, latterly, quite raunchy routines.

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Nineteenth Century Venuses: Glamour Girls of 1855

No sooner had photography been developed in the mid nineteenth century then enterprising Frenchmen immediately realised that this new medium could be used to take pictures of naked women.  As we discussed on our The Seduction of Venus blog when looking at some early girl/girl photographs the early French erotic photographs were taken using the daguerreotype process which meant that each one was a one-off original which could not be reproduced; meaning they cost the equivalent of a week's wages for the average person.

By the early to mid eighteen-fifties the technology had moved on to the ambrotype or collodion positive which was much cheaper to produce than a daguerreotype.  It also lacked the mirror-like metallic surface of the latter making it easier to view. 

In addition, ambrotypes were often tinted for added realism and also because they didn't have the contrast of daguereotypes.  One of the biggest disappointments for most people, when viewing a photograph for the first time in this period, it seems, was the lack of colour.

These pictures were all taken in and around 1855; over one hundreed and fifty years ago.  They range from the rather coy to pictures that were not dissimilar in pose and explicitness to those published  in magazines like Penthouse 120 years later.

Just to give an idea of the distance back in time that is represented here, 1855 saw  Britain and France fighting the Crimean War against the Russians, Charlotte Brontë died, King Camp Gilette was born, the official Bordeaux wine classification was devised, The Daily Telegraph was first published and the first bridge over the Mississippi opened. 

Boulevard du Temple, Paris 1838 (detail)

The very first photograph of a living human being had only been made 17 years earlier. Louis Daguerre's  photograph of Boulevard du Temple needed a ten minute exposure and, as a result, most of the people and traffic in the scene do not appear as they didn't remain still enough to be captured on film.  There are a number of people who did stay in the same place for that time and you can just catch the man having his shoes cleaned and another sat at a table nearby.

The technology had moved on and by 1855 exposures of only a few seconds were needed.  In studios scattered around  Paris the first young ladies were being persuaded to take all their clothes off and have their rounded little bodies recorded for posterity and the entertainment of others. 

They are all a rather similar body type because, of course, women 150 years ago were very petite, averaging only just over five feet tall, so they tend to have short legs and stocky bodies. 

As we have noted in our other pieces on The Seduction of Venus, the appeal of these photographs to collectors at the time was that they were the record of real people rather than the idealised fantasy of an artist; artists who, themselves, because of the nature of art teaching at the time, were overly influenced by the portrayal of women seen in classical statues.

These pocket venuses, with their soft curves, speak to us too from back in time where, occasionally, as in the study above, you find a haunting face staring back at you that you could see on any street today.

More women from the early days of photography another time.

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