To 1920
It seems likely, though not absolutely certain, that the first nude photograph was taken almost immediately after the medium was born. At all events, the optician Nicolas Lerebours, a photographer and author of technical manuals, claimed to have produced them from 1841. But the daguerreotyped nudes that have survived are mostly anonymous and hard to date precisely. As with portraits, however, there was a lively trade in nudes from an early stage. The ostensible purpose of these images—known as académies—was to serve as studies, or life documents, for painters and sculptors. They were therefore considered not as works in their own right but as a convenient bridge between the reality of the model and the finished work of the artist, who thereby saved himself wearisome and sometimes expensive drawing sessions. Delacroix wrote in his journal that photography was ‘the palpable demonstration of the delineation of nature's true form, of which we otherwise have only the most imperfect idea’; he, and other painters who were more discreet about their methods, like Gérôme or Courbet, regularly used nude photographs from the early 1850s onwards. To meet the requirements of artists, or because they had neither the time nor the freedom to develop a properly photographic aesthetic of the human body, the first photographers who specialized in this field often produced inept versions of ‘fine-art’ nudes, modelled on the antique sculptures used in beginners' classes, Ingres odalisques, or studio props.
The liveliest—indeed, practically the only—production centre for nude photographs c. 1840-c. 1880 was Paris. The centre of artistic life, and a city with more tolerant attitudes than other capitals, it had the photographers, models, and artists for these pictures, as well as other customers who were not necessarily interested in turning them into paintings.
From the 1850s onwards, production boomed. The painter Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795-1866) took up photography and created dozens of artistic calotype nudes between 1852 and 1854, some of which were used by Courbet and Delacroix. Other artists, often also painters by training, like Louis-Camille d'Olivier (1828-after 1870) or Jacques Antoine Moulin (1802-after 1875), used charming models to create highly seductive académies. The question of whether these images were primarily artistic or erotic obviously raises fundamental issues about the photograph's realism in an area in which closeness to reality was a bonus for art. The ambiguity remains despite the fact that, officially, these ‘academic’ studies were intended as study material for artists. Although the large preponderance of female photographic nudes compared with male ones matched that in painting, it can also be explained by demand from male collectors of nude photos. The police, who closely scrutinized the trade, banned the pictures from public display and only allowed them to be sold in the context of art training.
In fact certain photographers, such as Gaudenzio Marconi (1841-85) or Louis Igout (1837-after 1885), specifically identified themselves as suppliers of the École des Beaux-Arts, and their style, with its constant reference to classical gestures derived from painting and sculpture, and the studied simplicity of its settings, reduced the nude image's ambiguity to a minimum. Others who were well known in different fields did occasional nudes, either (Le Secq, Nègre) in connection with their own paintings, or (Nadar, Le Gray) to meet special requests from artists.
Only a few photographers c. 1850-c.1890 presented nudes as fully-fledged works in their own right. An example was the London-based Swede Oscar Gustav Rejlander, whose ambitious, large-scale morality picture The Two Ways of Life used combination printing to incorporate large numbers of nude women, whose realism shocked the public when it was exhibited in 1857.
However, the emergence of pictorialism towards the end of the 19th century created a new situation. Photography's assertive claim to be an art automatically secured the nude's entrée into the national and international salons held on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s and 1900s. Especially in France (Robert Demachy, Émile Constant Puyo) and the USA (Clarence White, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen) fine examples were created which, with their indistinct backgrounds, selective treatment of detail, and often more or less veiled eroticism, resembled contemporary Symbolist (later Art Nouveau) paintings, prints, and drawings. Indeed, one of the leading exponents of the pictorialist nude, the expatriate American Frank Eugene, used an etching needle among other manipulations to create an essentially graphic effect. Although past its peak by c. 1910, pictorialism set a pattern for the ‘salon nude’ that was to remain a feature of mainstream exhibitions and photographic annuals into the 1950s: young and nearly always female, artfully posed and lit, without body hair, anonymous, and often with arch titles such as Sans Souci or The Woodland Pool.
From the 1870s and 1880s onwards, meanwhile, the use of nude photographs by artists had become increasingly commonplace, from Auguste Rodin, Alexandre Falguière, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to Gustave Moreau and Pablo Picasso. The list could probably be greatly extended if more photographic evidence had survived. Simpler technology also encouraged artists to take their own studio or open-air nudes: for example, painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, André Derain, Thomas Eakins, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Edvard Munch, Alphonse Mucha, Franz Stuck, and José Maria Sert, illustrators like Heinrich Zille, and sculptors such as François-Rupert Carabin and Antoine Bourdelle.
Finally, scientists also appropriated nude photography, especially those whose research was linked to the arts and to the representation of movement: e.g. Paul Richer (1849-1933), Albert Londe, Eadweard Muybridge, and Étienne-Jules Marey. The physician Richer, Charcot's assistant at the Paris Salpêtrière, then from 1903 professor of artistic anatomy (on which he had published a classic textbook in 1889) at the École des Beaux-Arts, created demonstration pictures of male and female models in motion that included precise annotations of measurements and age. Richer worked closely with Londe, from 1882 the director of the Salpêtrière's photographic laboratory. Both knew the work of Muybridge and Marey. Over three decades from 1880 to 1910, these four scientists used instantaneous exposures and the systematic breaking down of movement to investigate every aspect of the body in motion, its static poses and dynamic sequences, in the service of art.
Since 1920
The 1920s were a time of economic, political, and social change, accelerated by the horrors of the First World War and a desire to reject the class inequality and political instability of the past. In American and European cities, affluence, consumerism, commercial mass entertainment, and the increased spending power and social freedom of women undermined traditional conventions and popularized self-consciously modern lifestyles. New illustrated newspapers and magazines, or modernized versions of existing ones, appeared, along with innovative ways of reporting political, cultural, and sporting events through the camera and the printed page. Later, especially in continental Europe, left- and right-wing totalitarian movements identified themselves with the creation of a ‘New Man’, and with modernistic or pseudo-modernistic utopias in which the healthy, youthful ‘body beautiful’, disciplined by collective sporting activity, would play an emblematic role. But in bourgeois-liberal and social democratic circles too, there were visions of a cleaner, healthier, more egalitarian society to be achieved by revolutions in urban planning and education and the construction of welfare states, sometimes underpinned by fashionable eugenic notions.
At first glance, the kind of nude photography that epitomized the period was the work of Martin Munkácsi: sporty girls with bobbed hair doing healthy, modern things: jogging round pools, climbing into baths, or luxuriating under showers. But the variety of the genre was now much greater than before the war. Still ubiquitous was pornography, by the 1920s largely in postcard format, though often in traditional ‘French’ or fake-Orientalist guise, and available in legendary sleaze havens like Port Said and Soho. With a core clientele of soldiers, tourists, and schoolboys, and given a new lease of life by the Second World War, it flourished well into the second half of the century, until displaced by mainstream glamour magazines and ultimately video cassettes. Visible genitalia, provocative eye contact, and voluptuous poses were its hallmarks; Atget's Reclining Woman (1920), of a friendly prostitute displaying herself for a long exposure, was its nearest approach to classic photography. Glamour photographs were less revealing and technically and aesthetically more polished. Specialists in Europe included the Vienna Manassé Studio, which used starlets and cabaret artists as models and livened up its nudes with visual trickery, and in the USA experts in suggestive semi-nudity like Alfred Cheney Johnston (1893-1971); although, like Hollywood films, American glamour was increasingly censored in the 1930s. Also widely circulated since before 1914 was ‘naturist’ imagery, an offshoot of the Central European Lebensreform movement with its sun cults and rejection of body-deforming modern clothing. The photographic nudes in naturist magazines and books like Franz Löwy's Das schöne nackte Weib (1921) illustrate the benefits of various diets and regimes, or different physical or ethnic types; the more stylish and dynamic prefigure the athletes and dancers of Leni Riefenstahl.
Outside the mainstream, the avant-garde nude was characterized by formal and technical experimentation, wit, eroticism, and sometimes undertones of fetishism and sadomasochism. Techniques used to make the human body strange included solarization and negative printing (Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Feininger), the distorting properties of certain lenses (Brassaï, Kertész), and the use of shadows, mirrors, and surreal juxtapositions (Kesting, Imogen Cunningham, George Platt Lynes). This work, much of it done in Paris, remained widely influential, from Bill Brandt in England to Grete Stern in Argentina. Another astonishingly productive concentration of nude photographers was in Prague, where Anton Trcka (1893-1940), Jaromir Funke, František Drtikol, Josef Sudek, and others moved between a range of styles from late pictorialism to Surrealism and abstraction. But some of the most outstanding modern nudes of the period between the 1920s and the 1940s were created in the USA, by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. Stieglitz's reputation in the field rests on pictures of friends like Rebecca Salsbury-Strand at Lake George in upstate New York in the 1920s, and on a long series of probing and intimate studies of his wife Georgia O'Keeffe. Weston's derives from the nudes modelled by Tina Modotti and other lovers in the 1920s, after he had abandoned pictorialism, and from pictures of his second wife Charis Wilson in the 1930s and 1940s. The best work of both photographers succeeds and moves through its balance of abstract, erotic, and naturalistic elements, endowing real anatomies with sculptural form.
The variety of nude photography increased still further after 1945. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, Brandt, another of the century's great nude photographers, used chiaroscuro, close-ups, and wide-angle distortion to explore the nude as abstract form. On Sussex beaches, ears like shells, hair like weed, and boulders of flesh appear as objects of contemplation, surreal and strange. The influence of Brandt's work, which itself looked back to Brassaï's and Kertész's nudes of the 1930s, remained strong, for example on Japanese photographers like Eikoh Hosoe and Kishin Shinoyama.
In the background the cultural context was changing again. As social mores became more liberal and censorship declined in the 1960s, there was an upsurge of nudity in the arts and mass culture of the West. Countries like Portugal and Spain, which until 1974 and 1975 had endured years of clerical-authoritarian dictatorship, underwent periods of intense cultural experimentation which, at least in cities, included discovery of the photographic nude. The same would happen after the end of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe (1989-90).
An obvious consequence was a vast expansion of commercial glamour photography, extending from tabloid newspapers and lifestyle magazines to ‘top shelf’ publications whose only selling point was nudity, supported by sexually explicit text. Long-standing taboos on pubic hair and genitalia disappeared, and magazines like Playboy, which had symbolized anti-puritanism in the 1950s, looked old-fashioned by the 1970s. Amateurs also experimented, as technical manuals and sometimes clubs increasingly offered tips on shooting ‘glamour’. Although by the 1990s there were signs of a new prudishness emerging, especially in relation to depictions of children, the display and marketing of nudity on an immense scale seemed to have become fundamental to Western civilization.
This had important implications for ‘serious’ nude photography. On the one hand, the decorous neo-pictorialist nude finally disappeared during the 1960s. On the other, male nude photography, formerly an under-the-counter product no matter how seriously done, became increasingly acceptable, at least in big-city galleries and art-publishing circles, and artists like Robert Mapplethorpe joined the mainstream. Meanwhile, an important strand of nude photography remained strongly influenced both by Brandt and by the modernism of the inter-war period, with its emphasis on the body as pure form, either ‘museumized’ in isolation or discovered naturally in the open air, entwined in trees or lapped by waves. A major exponent of this was Lucien Clergue, whose first collection of Mediterranean nudes, Corps mémorables, appeared as early as 1957, and who spent his subsequent career depicting the (mainly female) nude as a kind of sculptural revelation in quarries, deserts, on beaches, and in city buildings. Franco Fontana followed in colour, creating abstract compositions with trees, pools, and magnificent torsos (Frammenti, 1982).
A contrasting response to the ubiquitous ‘glamour nude’, with its glossy, blemish-free surface and defining lack of intimacy, has been in the direction of realism and, precisely, intimacy: the nude as naked person. Anticipated decades before by amateurs like Bonnard, Andreyev, and Lartigue, this has characterized the work of photographers like Harry Callahan, Emmet Gowin, and Nicholas Nixon who—like Stieglitz and Weston—have photographed partners or spouses over years or even decades. (David Bailey's brilliant study of Marie Helvin, Trouble and Strife (1980), also deserves mention, although intimacy is often blocked by visual gimmickry). Less tender and more detached, but comparable in their rejection of glamour and artifice, are Lee Friedlander's Nudes (1991): young women in unkempt domestic settings, plainly lit and with skin blemishes, body hair, and genitals exposed to the camera in matter-of-fact, even casual self-revelation. Other photographers have moved further along the scale of realism in their pursuit of ‘the nakedness of the human creature’, confronting the viewer with bodies that are old, deformed, or hermaphroditic. Representative of this approach is the group of photographers associated with the Internet magazine Nerve. But still more extreme in his rejection of the idealized, commercial nude has been Boris Mikhailov, whose photographs of naked or semi-naked slum dwellers, alcoholics, and homeless people seem like a deliberate of parody of the Western glamour industry.
— Rolf Sachsse/Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Jay, B., Views on Nudes (1979).
- Kelly, J. (ed.), Nude Theory (1979).
- Clergue, L., Nude Workshop (1982).
- Nudes, introd. S. Callahan and P. Olschewski (1995).
- Richter, P.-C., Nude Photography: Masterpieces from the Past 150 Years (1998).
- Boris Mikhailov: Case History (1999).
- Field, G. (ed.), Nerve/The New Nude (2000).
- Pohlmann, U., et al., The Nude: Ideal and Reality. From the Invention of Photography to Today (2004)
