The second issue of Plain Brown Wrapper is in the archive. Vol. 2, No. 2 from Summer 1975 is the voyeur issue — Rick Tedesco picks up the thread he dangled in his Spring letter ("I found an apartment with venetian blinds that throw the kind of shadows you see in detective movies") and delivers on it. The theme is looking at what you were not supposed to see.
Rick's two-page essay opens with the French root of the word — "someone who sees, that is all" — and works toward an argument that the best photograph is always the one where the subject forgot the camera was there. He cites Rear Window. He mentions two European photographers by surname without explaining who they are, which is a thing he does. The essay lands where it usually lands: on a claim that Plain Brown Wrapper is something other than what you think it is. "Playboy is a performance," he writes. "Plain Brown Wrapper is trying to be a witness."
The apartment on West 49th with the venetian blinds is real — or real enough. It is a sublet. The blinds throw horizontal bars of light across the back bedroom that shift when trucks pass on the street outside. Rick shot in it every day for ten days. The shadows are the star of the issue in the way the stockings were the star of Issue 1.
The cover girl is Angie Tramonti, 27, from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She runs the switchboard at a shipping company in Red Hook — six years at the same desk, routing calls for men who move cargo they never see. Rick met her at a party on the East Side in April. She was standing near the window. He told her it was a good angle. She said it caught the most light. She came to the apartment on West 49th two weeks later and stood in the venetian blind shadows for about twenty minutes before she forgot the camera was there. The centerfold is a full-length portrait printed sideways — turn the magazine clockwise to view the full figure standing at the blinds.
Deborah K. is 31 and works as a pharmacist's assistant on 181st Street in Washington Heights, which Rick notes means she knows the secrets of about four hundred families. Her spread is shot in her own apartment, which has a clawfoot bathtub Rick had been trying to borrow for two years. She is photographed in the bathroom doorway with steam behind her. Rick found her through a mutual model acquaintance. She said no three times before she said yes.
Yolanda Cruz, 34, sews wedding dresses at a bridal shop on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx — eleven years, five hundred dresses, an opinion about satin that she will share if you ask. Rick spotted her in a diner on Tremont in March and watched her for twenty minutes without realizing he was doing it. She agreed to be photographed in her own apartment, in front of a large vanity mirror inherited from her grandmother. The mirror doubles everything in the room. Rick spent two hours deciding which reflection to photograph. He ended up photographing both.
On the Square expands to three pages this issue — twelve women from twelve blocks of Times Square, one photo each. The voyeur theme means Rick found all twelve in doorways, fire escapes, bar mirrors, and laundromat windows. The short blurbs are some of the best writing in the issue. Sandra P., a checkout clerk at the Gristede's on Ninth Avenue, was photographed on her fire escape three floors up. "She caught me looking and did not move," Rick writes. "Said if somebody was already looking, she might as well get paid."
From the Booth reviews The Private Afternoons of Pamela Mann (1974, Radley Metzger under his Henry Paris alias) at the Rialto on 42nd Street. Rick gives it four out of five and complains about the wah-wah synthesizer score. "The silence of watching someone who does not know you are there would be better."
What Rick Likes is Nathan's Famous on Surf Avenue at Coney Island, not the 42nd Street one. He went twice this July, once alone, once with Carmen. They got rained on at the end of the second trip. He recommends bringing a dollar.
Reader Mail follows up threads from Issue 1 — Jerry from Allentown wants to buy a gift subscription for his buddy, the German subscriber in Düsseldorf has received the Spring issue only five weeks late ("the customs stamp is getting smaller"), and Anonymous from Queens wants to know who Carmen is.
This copy is from the same archive as Vol. 2, No. 1 — Rick's filing cabinet, transferred to a private collector in 2019. The color reproduction is in excellent shape. The centerfold shows the fold crease. The Kodachrome printing on heavy coated stock holds the warm shadows and venetian blind highlights without muddying. Scanned on a consumer flatbed at approximately 150 DPI equivalent.