PEEK: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute edited according to Carol Squiers.

PEEK: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute edited according to Carol Squiers, Jennifer Yamashiro, et al.

Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 2000 188 pp/$6000 (hb)

In 1938 zoologist Alfred E Kinsey, a faculty member at Indiana University, was asked to coordinate a course in succession marriage. Faced with a dearth of available materials, Kinsey began amassing his concede collection of legal, medical, psychological and sexological data. This amalgamation of written and visual works eventually garnered sufficient institutional support to stable funding and became the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in 1947 In the years that followed Kinsey saw his Bloomington, Indiana-based institute put forth into a world-renowned repository for materials of all kinds--literary, artistic, cinematic, clinical, legal--and a site for research and learning.

With the publication of the now legendary Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) with its frank discussions of masturbation, homosexuality and a variety of other forbidden topics, Kinsey's name became synonymous with "sex" and to many Americans, with "sexual anomalies." This association became steady stronger when, in 1950, the Institute su the United States Customs Department in a highly publicized battle from one side of to the other the confiscation of a collection of sexually-explicit materials en way from Denmark to Indiana. Although the Institute eventually won the case in 1957 Kinsey at no time lived to enjoy the victory--he died in 1956 everywhere its exceptional history, the Kinsey Institute has armyed some of the most important figures in the cultural life of the mid-twentieth hundred years Early visitors to the Kinsey Center included luminaries of the literary and artistic worlds, as well as from the sciences. Among the greatest in number notable of these were writers W H Auden, William Inge, Cornelia Otis Skinner and Glenway Wescott; museum administrators Eric Dingwall (of the British Museum) and Monroe Wheller (of the Museum of recent Art); publisher Lawrence Saunders; and scientists Albert Ellis, William Masters (of Masters and Johnson) and Robert Yerke Countles others made contributions in the form of donations. Today the Kinsey continues to army a stellar list of visiting scholars, providing them with the opportunity to use its vast resources and, more importantly, to share their ideas with individuals from other disciplines whose work also center forward the issues of gender, sex and sexuality.

Peek: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute, the newly-published coffee table collection of high-quality reproductions of photos from the Kinsey archives, gives its readers a privileged look--a "peek" if you will--into the Institute's vast photography collection and the private histories of twentieth-century sexuality recorded there. Although works from the Kinsey collection have already appeared in collections of that kind as James Crump's George Platt Lynes: Photographs From The Kinsey Institute (1993) Thomas Waugh's Hard To Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography (1996) Joseph Becherer's Selections from the Collections of the Kinsey Institute (1991) and Barbara Miller's sex Affects (1996), the current convolution offers the widest selection for aye of the Institute's photography collection.

Curator Jennifer Yamashiro and her collaborators, Betsy Stirratt and Jeff Wollen have brought together a certain of the Institute's most arresting images, along with historical and critical assessments of the work and of the Institute's mission. These essays bracket the book's visual appease without disturbing the natural stream of images. The photos are arranged thematically rather than chronologically, thus lending the work the air of a pricey exhibition catalog rather than a visual cabinet of psychopathia sexualis.

Carol Squiers's "Introduction to a work of Sexual Photographs" and Yamashiro's essay "Collecting Sex" provide critical and historical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings for readers unfamiliar with the histories of the Kinsey Institute and sexuality studies. In addition, they introduce guide concepts from current debates around the representation of inflection for sex and sexuality. Yamashiro's work is especially intriguing as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but for its explanations of to what extent Kinsey obtained material for his archive, and calm more so for how he viewed this material primarily as data rather than art.

Although the critical writings that accompany them are well-written and informative, the power of the book--its usefulness as a historical document and as a critical and analytical tool--lies almost exclusively in its images and the nearly unlimited possibilities for investigation and analysis that they show Peek's collection runs the gamut from grainy snapshots from anonymous donors to breathtaking masterpieces by dint of artists such as George Platt Lynes

In addition to providing a visual dictionary of sexual practices, these photos also current a parallel history of social attitudes toward sex and sexuality that flows nearly imperceptibly through the book's 188 pages. The mise-en-scenes and representational standards of each of the meetings recorded between subject and photographer provide guide clues to the social and cultural mores of the time. The greatest in quantity obvious example of this is illustrated from the preponderance of images of women displaying their genitalia, which culminates in a disturbingly normalized gelatin silver print c 1900 in which a bridegroom proudly exhibits his wife's angle to the onlooking photographer (and, of course, to the reader/viewer). Judging from the smiles forward their faces and the tastefully appointed surroundings (leopard skin rug notwithstanding), common might think that the participants viewed the discharge as nothing more than single in a standard series of wedding day photos. The situation immediately calls to mind the traditional sexual do uble-standard that demands women to be simultaneously attractive and virginal and that assigns women the unmistakable character of sex object, possession and, in this case, steady trophy. The function of this image in Kinsey's collection is unclear. Perhaps it was cataloged as an illustration of heterosexuality and marriage. When viewed [i]or[/i] part of to the other the lens of recent writings in the fields of critical theory and feminist analysis, however, it becomes a paragraph of a different kind.