Drawing on a panorama of materials from 1930s France, French Erotic Photographs takes a new approach to studying a certain type of image from a certain type of time. Previously untapped by historians, magazines such as Paris Magazine, Paris Sex Appeal, Pages Folles, Pour lire à deux and Scandale are inscribed in the context of the interwar years. They reflect that context through a bawdy style, audacious and multifaceted aesthetic – from kitsch to moderns – and a permeability to reproducibility. With a focus on the photographs as components of the magazines’ layout, Alix Agret critically examines their interrelations with texts and graphic, without neglecting the history surrounding them, which forms a backdrop to the analyses of this previously unstudied source material.The first study of its kind, this is a timely scholarly contribution to field of the history of photographs.