The Ashes

In honor of the opening of Playboy’s new, free online archive, I thought I’d put up some of my favorite images from the issues of yesteryear. Or rather, Jason Salavon’s excellent, creepy amalgamations of four decades worth of playboy centerfolds, all digitized into four images:

From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

It’s particularly creepy if you take into account this is how Hugh Hefner has always seen women: indeterminate, flesh-colored vapor. Click the image or here to see the bigger versions.