Prehistoric cave drawings, statues from ancient Greece
and Rome, erotic sculptures from India and Africa, naked
female figures and other ancient artifacts the world over are
testimony to the powerful fascination of the naked body.
The invention of photography in the 19th century created
a new means of portraying the body, and while its early
practitioners drew upon European traditions of painting
for their subjects, composition, and lighting, the differencesin approach between the two art forms soon started to
evolve. In particular, rapport between the artist and model
became crucial.
Photography also brought a choice never before available
in visual art: whether to capture a scene instantly, as it
existed—which became known as reportage—or to create
an artistic composition by deliberately putting every element
in place before the shutter was opened.Nudity with a message
While early photographs were technically difficult to produce, they
paved the way for a visual experience that anyone could enjoy. As
photography grew in popularity, so did images of the naked body,
both male and female, introducing sexuality into the new medium,
albeit often in the guise of aestheticism. These nudes, photographed
in daylight, seemed excitingly real compared to those in paintings,
where the viewer knew that the artist had painstakingly described
the light on the model’s body in the way that he or she chose.One of the first nude images, however, by Hippolyte Bayard (1801–
1887), had nothing to do with eroticism or any classical appreciation
of the human form. In Self-Portrait As a Drowned Man, Bayard
portrayed himself naked except for a piece of cloth representing
a shroud, seated in a slumped position, apparently dead. Bayard
had invented his own photographic technique of positive printing
at about the same time as Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), but it was
Daguerre and his “daguerreotype” that received official recognition
from the French government. As a reaction against the injustice
he felt had been committed, Bayard created
this photograph. Not only was this the first
political use of a nude photograph, it was also
the first one to show the human body in a
theatrical setting. It may in fact have been the
first photograph of a nude human figure ever,
as Daguerre’s technique needed an extremely
long exposure time and his photograph of a
female body in 1839 had been achieved by
photographing a sculpture.erotic Nudes
In the early 1840s, improved lenses and
chemicals made exposure times of less
than a minute possible, paving the way for
popular portraiture. Another development
was the stereoscopic camera, which gave
the illusion of a three-dimensional image by
presenting slightly different two-dimensional
images next to each other. They were not
only used for portraits but also to show secret,
erotic, “real” images.the history of nude photography
Hippolyte Bayard
Self-Portrait As a Drowned Man (1840)
expressed Bayard’s despair at the lack
of recognition for his work.12 THE HI sTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy