There is hardly any nudity in this book, just a few Vegas showgirls, and the high-class stripper Lili St. Cyr. She thought of herself as an artist, and that’s the way Bernard shot her. He was not an ironic man and never retouched a photo: whatever he was up to, he was up to it in earnest. Back then a lot of people were willing to entertain the idea that a cheesecake photographer could be an artist, and so could a stripper. In 1951, at Ciro’s, a high-class Hollywood nightclub, the audience for Miss St. Cyr’s act included Bernard, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Eleanor Roosevelt.
