Biography

The unusual part of the career is the desk. Drew edited the British edition of Penthouse, which meant commissioning photographs rather than only appearing in them, and she spent the 1980s as a monthly nude in Club International. Those two jobs sit on opposite sides of the same transaction. One puts a body in front of a lens; the other decides which bodies, which angles and which issues reach the newsstand. Very few performers cross that line, and fewer still do it while their own image is still circulating. The knowledge is practical: what a picture costs, what a page needs, how a caption changes a reader's attention. It is the education of someone who has been both the subject and the editor.

In 1993 she published a memoir of her working life, which is a rare thing in a business that usually leaves the telling to other people. The book turned a career into a narrative while the career was still running, and it gave her a voice that photographs could not. The lead portrait on this page belongs to the same period: a nude seated on a grey floor, a white sheet of paper held up in one hand, a typewriter and a paper-strewn desk behind her. It reads as a joke about office work and exposure at once, and the smile suggests she is in on it. That composure is the through line.