Every Playboy Centerfold, Normalized - The Life and Thoughts of Zach
Nov. 10th, 2003
01:53 am - Every Playboy Centerfold, Normalized
You can't visit memepool and not find something that you have the irresistible urge to repost on your blog. It is a good thing that I only remember to visit that site once every few months.
In the spirit of statistically optimal music, I give you Average Porn.
The photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.
The change in hair color is the most strikingly obvious detail. I want to say it looks like they're getting skinnier too but I don't know if I'm reading that into the images based on my expectations or if that effect is really visible. It seems like the poses must not vary much. I've actually only seen like 2 actual playboy centerfolds so I don't have a lot of experience with the source images here.
Oh and completely unrelated, here are those VERY WRONG G. I. Joe remixes that I have mentioned to some people here and there.
eigenpussy? shaken,not stirred?
Re: eigenpussy? shaken,not stirred?
Re: eigenpussy? shaken,not stirred?
That you can see the vague image of a body at all in images averaged over an entire decade suggests to me that the images don't vary much. There's definitely a set paradigm in which the poses all take place.
If you look around the artist's site he does a bunch of other photo averaging projects including a video averaging of each of the three big late night talk shows. It's pretty intense to see just how formulaic the introductions to those shows are as well.
I have no idea what caused the color variation, though I like the later background colors better than the earlier ones. The different skin colors are bizarre. Trends in airbrushing, perhaps?
Another possibility with the color could be just different lighting techniques too. I've certainly seen color photos of the exact same subject reveal a WIDE range of "redness" (or lack thereof) in the skin tone depending on the lighting conditions and development technique. Like twisting the "hue" or "color" knob on your TV.