The Shaw Puzzle

Here we go, again, dipping into the anonymous enigma that is the iconic Scottish Spick and Span photographer Shaw. These three pictures are of a girl called Debbie and were taken by Mike Haywood of Sheer Image in black-and-white on a medium-format camera. The drape at the back indicates they were taken in a studio as opposed to later pics and videos shot by Mike. They probably date back to the 1970s. Around that time Mike definitely used a studio in Watford (which is where this session may have taken place). Debbie has been given a men’s mag to flip through in case there’s any doubt what she thinks the photos are for. I would guess the mag was lying around the studio to underline the type of trade it was dealing in (who knows , some photos taken there may have ended up in Knave). Mike used to boast that his models came from a variety of sources, generally through his day job as a wedding videographer (wives of squaddies from Colchester barracks were an apparent speciality). Fact was, though, he cut his teeth in studios such as the one in Watford, encountering willing subjects such as Debbie for a few quid. Although I have absolutely no evidence to prove it, I would wager that was how Shaw got his initial contacts at similar establishments north of the border. Once he’d got his foot in the door and started selling to Croydon, he had the calling card to attract new talent. The reason why I call this post a puzzle is the years (and places) Shaw and Haywood were operating in were very different. We all know the permissive society arrived in the Swinging Sixties (along with the Pill and the mini-skirt), but Shaw was already off the scene when that took root. As a teenager then, “mucky books” were something you didn’t dare get caught with and the blokes who bought them were dirty old men to be avoided at all cost. And as for the girls who appeared in them, well, they were the worst of the lot and don’t you dare bring one home for tea. By the time Mike Haywood was frequenting dodgy studios, morals had loosened a bit and mags like Knave were selling a few copies and weren’t so much the spawn of the devil their predecessors had been. But that wasn’t the case in Shaw’s day. Which brings me to the puzzle. As I’ve noted before, more than 50 dolls passed through Shaw’s portal in a very short time when such activities would have been widely frowned upon, at least compared with Mike’s ascendancy and certainly with the first quarter of the 21st century. How on earth did he do it? Tap on the pic and then on each subsequent one to see all three.