THE first person through the door on Saturday morning refused to pay

his #1 entrance fee and stood, open-shirted and pot-bellied, leering at

the photographs. Lindsay Lewis of Stills Gallery, currently hosting the

exhibition What She Wants, worried that the notice on the door warning

that the work is too explicit for under-18s was a red rag to bullish

deviants, but her fears proved unfounded. The stream of mixed-sex

spectators soon filled the comment book with approving messages such as

''Well done'' and ''At last!''

Part of Signals, the current UK-wide Festival of Women Photographers,

What She Wants was assembled in response to the anti-pornography debate

of the late eighties. The depictions by over 60 American and European

women of the male body amounts to a spectacular visual volley against

the po-faced censorship camp. The exhibition is a bold and erotic voyage

of discovery for both viewer and artist.

The accompanying text explores the relationship between photographer

and model, revealing an insight and self-examination which is rarely

disclosed by male artists about their female subjects. ''When I first

started photographing his penis I would get headaches. I begin to

realise how much I liked looking at him. That's when the trouble

started. When I put the camera up to my eye I had to acknowledge 'I want

to look at this'. I felt totally exposed,'' admits Robin Shaw.

Slowly perusing the exhibition I succumbed to this hungry look. Women

have still been offered little more than Chippendale beefcake in the way

of erotica but the variety of works on show at Stills cater for a wide

selection of tastes, from the romantically sensual -- Diane Baylis's

close-up of whiskered lips in And Then He Kissed Me -- to more dangerous

flirtations -- Ruth Ruske's velvet-gloved hand clutching a handcuffed

penis in Liaison.

Female views of maleness inevitably focus on phallic imagery and the

majority of the photographs are of penises in various states of

tumescence, swathed in green chiffon in Jane Ralley's witty colour study

Coq D'Azur, slumping from a computer terminal in Flo Fox's User

Friendly, casting a canine shadow in Diane Baylis' Who's Afraid of the

Big Bad Wolf, and peeking through a bouquet in Ralley's A Rose Is A

Rose.

Two untitled works by Herlinde Koelbl present a witty silent satire; a

pert cockerel framed against a man's muscled erect back is juxtaposed

next to a photograph of a dead (or deeply drugged) cockerel curled

around a flaccid penis. Not so cocksure now.

The exhibition is shot through with humour although curator Naomi

Salaman rejected pictures which were too frivolous. There is great

warmth in the portraits, probably arising from the fact that there was

usually a close relationship -- friend or lover -- between artists and

model and many convey a sense of male vulnerability. Thus, while the

women photographs might poke fun at penis-worship the work is not

threatening. Men might blush but they won't cross their legs.

* What She Wants, Stills, Cockburn Street, Edinburgh, till October 22.