[ludovician]

Originally Posted by alonzo

I knew I had this somewhere. What follows are frequently asked questions from the old Yahoo Group. Remember the line about certain books being in print was written about 10 years ago:


WHO IS AKIRA GOMI?

Akira Gomi is a professional photographer from Japan. During the early-to-mid 1990s, he created a number of works containing posture-style images (“posture pictures”). Not surprisingly, most of his works contained images of Japanese women.


WHAT ARE SOME OF HIS WORKS?

Gomi's most well-known works are “Yellows 2.0 Tokyo 1993” and “Americans 1.0 Los Angeles 1994.” Another well-known work is “Yellows 3.0 China.” There was a "Yellows 1.0 Tokyo" but with black-and-white images. The last in the Yellows series was “Yellows 4.0 Men Tokyo 1995,” which featured male models (all of the others were of women.)

Gomi published other “Yellows” books during these years, each with its own theme, containing nude images of varying numbers of Japanese female models, but none ever achieved the following of his posture picture collections.


ARE THEY BOOKS OR CD-ROMS?

Originally his posture works were published as hardcover books and 24-bit CD-ROMS, and were very expensive. Later, a small paperback version and cheaper (8-bit 256 color) CD-ROM were issued. Apparently, the only versions of “Yellows 2.0 Tokyo 1993,” “Yellows 3.0 China,” and “Americans 1.0 Los Angeles 1994” still in print are the paperback books.

All versions of “Yellows 1.0 Tokyo” are apparently out of print. We are not aware of "Yellows 4.0 Men Tokyo 1995" ever being published in paperback or issued as a CD-ROM.


ARE THE BOOKS AND THE CD-ROMS IDENTICAL?

No. While all formats contain posture-style images of 100 different women (or men in the case of “Yellows 4.0”), the hardcover editions contained black-and-white images, while the paperback editions as well as the CD-ROMs were exclusively color.

The paperback book contains but a small portion of the images included in the CD-ROM version of the same work. Moreover, there may be 8 images of one model but only 2 images of another. Nor are the poses consistent from model to model.

The CD-ROM contains a movie (actually a slide show) of various poses of each model. Most importantly, it contains an index of all 100 models. By clicking on the face image, the viewer is then treated to a slide show of eight images of the particular model: clothed front view, facial close-up, nude front view, nude left view, nude rear view, nude
right view, close-up nude rear view and close-up nude front view.


WHERE DO THE IMAGES POSTED TO THIS E-GROUP COME FROM?

Most of what's here and elsewhere on the Internet was captured from the CD-ROM versions of "Americans 1.0 Los Angeles 1994" and “Yellows 2.0 Tokyo 1993.” This is especially true of the 7-image composites. Other images, including those from "Yellows 3.0 China," were likely scanned from the paperback book versions.


WHY ARE THERE NO IMAGES OF MEN?

As noted above, Gomi has only published one collection of male posture Pictures, "Yellows 4.0 Men Tokyo 1995." There are two likely reasons for the focus on women:

1. Japanese censorship requires digital blurring of genitals. This works OK on women's public hair, but blurring a man's penis ruins the effect.

2. The market for books containing images of nude men is MUCH smaller than for nude women. Yes, there may be women here or there who like to look at pictures of nude men, but the market is pretty much confined to gay men.


And finally, Akira Gomi:

Sorry to revive such an ancient topic, but I've done as much digging as I could on my own, and now I turn to the wisdom of the internet:

In 2022, someone posted an .iso rip of the original CD-ROM of Americans 1.0 to the Internet Archive. Around the same time someone on 4chan appeared with a full recovery on Mega that was empty by the time I got to it, though I did find an Imgur album that (frustratingly) cropped out parts of every photo and I've posted some samples below.

Did anyone here download the recovery before it vanished? Failing that, could anyone with more technical wizardry take a crack at extracting any images from the .iso? I've had no such luck with the latter.

Any and all help would be much appreciated. Many thanks!