Harrison Marks

George Harrison Marks (6 August 1926 – 27 June 1997) was an English glamour photographer and director of nudist, and later, pornographic films.

Born in Tottenham, Middlesex in 1926 to a Jewish family, Marks was 17 when he married his first wife, Diana Bugsgang.

He worked as a stand-up comedian in variety halls towards the end of the music hall era, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in a duo called Harrison and Stuart.

In the 1950s Marks and Pamela Green opened a photographic studio at 4 Gerrard Street, Soho.

Marks provided nude photographs for photographic magazines on a freelance basis as well as selling his own stills directly.

June Palmer began modelling professionally for Marks in the late 1950s and became one of his most famous models.

Marks left the act in 1951 to develop his photographic career, taking pictures of music-hall performers and showgirls.

The model and actress Pamela Green was performing as a dancer in a 1952 revue called Paris to Piccadilly, a version of the Folies Bergère in London.

She became Marks' lover and began working with him as a model.

With the profits from this work, they launched Kamera magazine in 1957.

Kamera featured Marks' glamour photography of nude women taken in the small studios or Marks' kitchen.

Marks' 1958 publicity materials contained one of the first uses of the word "glamour" as a euphemism for nude modelling/photography.

In 1958, as an offshoot of his magazines, Marks began making short films of his models undressing and posing topless, for the 8 mm film market.

These were popularly known as "glamour home movies".

His films were available over the counter at camera shops, and also supplied discreetly by mail order from the back pages of his Kamera magazine.

During the 1960s Marks had a relationship with another of his models, June Palmer, and he married his second wife Vivienne Warren in 1964.

While he was filming The Naked World of Harrison Marks he began a relationship with Toni Burnett, an actress and model who made a brief appearance in the film.

The magazine was an immediate success and the business expanded to employ around seventeen staff by the early 1960s, selling a number of other magazine titles such as Solo, postcards and calendars, and distributing imported French books and glamour magazines.

Photographic exhibitions were held at the Gerrard Street studio.

Marks was also the photographic consultant for the film Peeping Tom (1960), which featured Green in a cameo role.

In the 1960s Marks moved his studio to Saffron Hill near King's Cross Station and began selling photoshoots to the American magazine Swank.

After a judge threw out an obscenity charge against The Window Dresser, Marks continued to make 8 mm glamour films throughout the 1960s.

One such film, Witches Brew (1960) features Pamela Green as a witch casting spells; Marks makes a brief appearance as her hunchback assistant.

Their relationship ended in 1961.

One Marks 8mm glamour film was The Window Dresser (1961), in which Pamela Green starred as a cat burglar who hides from the law by posing as a display mannequin in a lingerie shop.

Marks appears in the film as the shop's owner; Green performs a striptease in the store's display window.

His feature films as a director were Naked - As Nature Intended (1961), The Chimney Sweeps (his only non-sex feature, 1963), The Naked World of Harrison Marks (1967), Pattern of Evil (1967), The Nine Ages of Nakedness (1969) and Come Play With Me (1977), which featured Mary Millington.

Clips from The Window Dresser were used in a 1964 piece on the glamour film scene in the Rediffusion programme This Week.

These clips showed Pamela Green fully unclothed; the ensuing controversy resulted in Green having to defend the film on the BBC Light Programme's Woman's Hour.

In another, Model Entry (1965), a cat burglar breaks into Marks' studio, strips and leaves him her address.

In Danger Girl, a stripping secret agent is put into bondage by a Russian spy; the agent breaks free, ultimately throwing her captor onto a circular saw.

In 1967, the year the film came out, Marks and Burnett had a daughter, Josie Harrison Marks.

Even more macabre is Marks' Perchance to Scream (1967) in which a model is transported to a medieval torture chamber.

In this film, Stuart Samuels plays an evil inquisitor who sentences topless women to be whipped and beheaded by a masked executioner.

His Kamera and Solo magazines ceased publication in 1968, with occasional single-issue magazines appearing subsequently.

In later years he supplied photographs to the men's magazines Men Only and Lilliput, and sold photosets to David Sullivan's magazines Ladybirds and Whitehouse.

Marks' and Green's business partnership was dissolved in the same year, and in 1970 Marks was bankrupt.

In 1971 he was tried at the Old Bailey for dealing in pornography by post.

Marks and Burnett married in September 1973, but they split up around 1978.

In 1979 Marks began a relationship with Louise Sinclair, a teenage glamour model.