The pre-digital in the digital: Private’s online back catalogue

ABSTRACT

This article addresses what happens to pornographic material during the transition from analogue to digital form. Started in Sweden in 1965, Private magazine is one of the oldest, still existing pornography companies, challenging the existing obscenity law in Sweden at the time of its first issue. Here, Private magazine and privateclassics.com function as a case study and point of departure for a discussion of materiality, nostalgia, and cultural memory, but more poignantly a changing legal context for pornography which, although called for, might also be an obstacle to research. Drawing on Whitney Strub’s idea of a ‘sanitation’ of the 1970s, a comparison of the physical issues of Private magazine and the scanned issues available (for a fee) on privateclassics.com shows that age indications in image captions in the magazine have been altered in order to concur with the legal situation of pornography today.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography history
• historiography
• Private
• child pornography
• archives

Acknowledgements

This article was originally written as a presentation at the symposium ‘Pornography in the Pre-Digital Era: Distribution, Consumption, and the Law’ at Linnaeus University, 24–25 April 2019. The symposium was organized by Mariah Larsson and Tommy Gustafsson.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The original symposium was funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond.