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Every year on Oct. 21, we celebrate National Archive Day, a holiday dedicated to the people and institutions who preserve our collective history. If you’ve read Playboy with any frequency, you know how important our archive is to us. Spanning 73 years, many hundreds of issues, and countless pictorials, Playboy deeply values our history, returning to it often to inform our present. We also deeply value our archives director, Christie Hartmann, the keeper of our rich past.
On National Archive Day, we asked Christie to unearth one of her favorite Playboy shoots: Shig Ikeda’s “Surreal Ladies,” in which the photographer used a 4×5 camera “to shoot dream-like scenes, piece by piece, on a single sheet of film,” Christie says. He layered the images to create a final product—a process that could take months to complete. The images were published in the August 1971 issue of the magazine.
Let’s let Christie explain:
