Les Demi Dieux revisited

Watching the Kenneth Anger DVDs last week (which really are superb, by the way, and should be on the Christmas shopping lists of anyone interested in underground cinema) had me hunting around for more of the kind of period imagery one sees in his Scorpio Rising (1964) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), imagery that’s erotic if seen with the correct eye (a gay one, naturally). The photos produced by Les Demi Dieux, a New York photographer of the Fifties and Sixties, correspond very much to the atmosphere in Anger’s films, not least because of the location, Scorpio Rising being filmed among the biker groups of Coney Island. I linked to a Flickr page showing some of these photos in March and since then this page has surfaced which sheds a bit more light on the still elusive history of these pictures.