14 THE HIsTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy
the scieNtific Nude
While the genre of erotic photography was developing and artists
were discussing the use of the human form in this new medium,
other photographers sought to explore the scientific and technical
possibilities of photography. In the us and France respectively,
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Etienne-Jules Marey
(1830–1904) performed experiments with chronography—a set
of photographs of a moving object at regular intervals—in which
the naked body became the perfect subject for artistic as well as
scientific reasons. Chronography captured movement which was
too fast for the eye to see, with a black background allowing the
comparison of different positions that the body assumed in motion.
Another popular 19th-century scientific area of research was
anthropology, and scientists were eager to build up photographic
records of the people who were the objects of their study. As travelbecame easier, curiosity about foreign lands increased. “Exotic”
photographs, often from the colonies in Africa or Asia, seduced
Western viewers with images of partially naked people.
This type of imagery and the fascination with people and
cultures far away existed in paintings and sculptures long before the
invention of photography. However, the new medium gave these
images a guarantee of authenticity which resulted in a boom in
ethnographic photography. Photographs of people living close to
nature, with different cultural values and ideas of sexual morality,
became very popular with Westerners for scientific, ideological,
and, of course, artistic and erotic reasons from the 1860s until
well into the 20th century. Although some photographers took
a genuinely scientific approach, many of the images could be
called “imaginative ethnography.” This exotic view of the foreign,
the romantic idealization, and the erotic fantasy verged on racism
and ethnocentricity, often saying more about the culture of the
photographers and their fantasies than about foreign cultures and
their indigenous peoples.
such an approach can be found in the work of Rudolf Lehnert
(1878–1948) and Ernest Landrock (1878–1966). Born in Bohemia
(then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Lehnert met Landrock, Eadweard Muybridge
Motion Study of an Athlete on the March was created in
California in about 1900 as one of Muybridge’s movement
studies. Influenced by Etienne-Jules Marey’s work, it was
achieved with the use of carefully timed multiple cameras.