Daguerreotypes of naked women were almost entirely taken in France between the 1840's and the 1850's and were often claimed to be for the purposes of artists models. The French painter Eugéne Delacroix (1798-1863) knew of daguerreotype studies of the male nude taken by the artist Jules-Claude Ziégler in about 1850 and by 1853 he obtained photographic prints taken by
Eugène Durieu (1800-1874). He used these studies as the basis for a series of sketches. Not surprisingly following the advent of the camera painting changed in France and in the 1850's there was a movement towards a new
'Realism' with painters such as Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) using photographs of female nudes by
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795-1866) as the basis for paintings such as
'L'Atelier' (1853) and
'Les Baigneuses' (1853).
| Oil paintings by Gustave Coubet based upon photographs |
Both of these oil paintings are clearly based upon known photographs by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795-1866).
- In L'Atelier (The Artist's Studio) 1855 (Musée d'Orsay) the woman partially concealed by the towel has been copied from a nude study by Villeneuve now in the Biblioteque Nationale (Paris).
- In Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) 1853 (The Musée Fabre, Montpellier) also used a Villeneuve print now in the Biblioteque Nationale (Paris).
The book by Aaron Scharf Art and Photography (1968) discusses these similarities and landscape paintings by Gustave Courbet that used photographs by Gustave Le Gray and Adolph Braun. | | [Checklist] | Click on image for details
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Many other influential artists including Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and
Alphonse Marie Mucha (1860-1939) used photographs as the basis for their designs. (For detailed studies of the relationships between photography and art see: Aaron Scharf 1968
'Art and Photography' and Van Deren Coke 1972
'The Painter and the Photograph: from Delacroix to Warhol'.)
| Early use of photographs of nudes as models to assist artists |
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Alfons Mucha
Alfons Mucha (Photographer); & Josef Mucha (Essay) |  |
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| Early female nude studies |
France was the center for the production of nude photographs and distinction between photographs that were taken to further art and those designed for more dubious purposes was blurred. In the middle of the nineteenth century the French photographer Auguste Belloc had his negatives confiscated by the authorities and in 1851 Felix Jacques Antoine Moulin was sent to prison for a month.
The oil paintings of nude women and children that lined the walls of salons and galleries were accepted as art but photographs were not. Similar confusion over what is art and what is obscene continues today. | | [Checklist] | Click on image for details
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A vast number of influential photographers have done nude studies and to list them all would be impossible and pointless - here all I'll do is list some of those that have produced exceptional work:
| Different approaches to the nude |
The naked form has been one of the dominant artistic themes since classical times. In painting and sculpture there can be the illusion of a separation between a real person and the work itself and this makes it more acceptable to polite society and allowed it access to the prudish salons of the nineteenth century. With photography there is no separation and it is, in most cases, a real person we are seeing and this raises artistic and moral questions. We find it difficult to ignore nagging fears about the exploitation of the participants even when they are willing and this is made all the more difficult when the motivations and morals of the photographer are unclear.
The examples selected highlight different sensitivities and approaches of the photographers. The unashamed full frontal pride in the body is the hallmark of Helmut Newton in this image which comes from his series "Big Nudes". The wonderfully curved and rounded back shot taken by Edward Weston looks more like a piece of fruit with all the symbolism that goes with that. The 1951 photograph by Bill Brandt is masterful for the depth of field and context. Here we do not need to see the entire form and two legs are sufficient to give us a sense of mystery. What is hidden is often far more sensual than what is shown. | | [Checklist] | Click on image for details
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The vast scale of the publics interest in the naked form is exemplified by the sales figures of magazines and of books that cater for this form of desire. When
Kishin Shinoyama published the book
'His Santa-Fe' (Tokyo, 1991) that contains nude photographs of the actress Rie Miyazawa it sold over a million copies.
Just as there are issues with the taking of female nudes by male photographers there are issues in the portrayal of men. Here it is difficult to separate out the beauty from the underlying messages of the homo-erotic.
One of the earliest, if not the earliest, naked self portrait was taken by the French pioneer
Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887). The
Self Portrait as a Drowned Man is significant for multiple reasons, firstly it produced in 1840 using a paper process invented by the photographer, secondly it was created as a direct propaganda piece to highlight the unfairness of the decision of the French authorities to promote and financially support
Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre but at the same time ignored
Hippolyte Bayard.
| With the early male photographs of men they appear to be less ambiguous than those of women but this has to be a personal opinion. They do seem to be predominantly artist studies rather than erotic. | | [Checklist] | Click on image for details
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| Herb Ritts in his 1984 series Fred with Tires took a sequence of shots of a well muscled body moving tires around in an auto repair shop - here strength and independence are the messages. The image by Arthur Tress is rather more tame than some of his but the placing of naked animals together in a misty forest glade takes us back to a timeless Eden of innocence when anything is possible. Robert Mapplethorpe produced a wide variety of images from exquisite flowers to powerful portraits but it was his studies of the naked male form that shocked and provoked outrage at some of his exhibitions. The outrage was simplistic and was sometimes based on little more than the fact the images were of well formed naked black men - it would seem that naked women were acceptable but naked men, especially black, were not. There are difficult images here but they are not exploitative and they make us question our values and taboos. | | [Checklist] | Click on image for details
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- Alair de Oliveira Gomes (1921-1992) telephoto photographs of men on the beach.
- Minor White (1908-1976)
- Herb Ritts (1952-2002)
- Arthur Tress
- Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)
- Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931) born at Wismar in Germany moved to Italy and in the 1920's took a series of staged portraits of boys dressed in classical costumes that certainly have a homo-erotic edge to them. Many of his glass plate negatives were destroyed by the Italian fascists as they were considered pornographic.
- Vera Friederich - Whilst it is commonplace for a man to photograph naked woman it is more unusual the other way around.
The definition of what is a pornographic image is subjective and I well remember the protests that were made over the exhibitions of
Robert Mapplethorpe's extraordinarily powerful images. The purpose of this site is not to provide titillating images but to encourage a deeper understanding of what makes a truly memorable image.
LuminousLint 
@LuminousLint
