photography meets art 15a German, in Tunisia in 1904. The pair established a photography
studio in Tunis, with Lehnert taking the photographs and Landrock
acting as manager of the studio. They later set up business in Cairo,
selling postcards and prints of romanticized desert scenes, Bedouin
tribespeople and partially clad or naked girls.
In the early years of the 20th century, while the naked body
could be shown under the category of art or science, portraying it in
terms of pure sexuality was still taboo. Ernest James Bellocq (1873–
1949) photographed prostitutes in the red-light district of New Orleans
in the early 1900s, but seems never to have made prints from his
10 x 8-inch glass negatives. Although the models posed proudly for
the camera, their faces were often scratched out on the negatives,
perhaps to preserve their anonymity. It was only in the 1960s that
some of the negatives were discovered and published by the
photographer Lee Friedlander.
PhotograPhy meets art
since its origin, photography had been a useful aid for painters and
sculptors, for whom many books with nudes in different poses and
settings were available. By the middle of the 1880s this led to a
movement for the recognition of photography as an equivalent art
form, known as pictorialism. The goal of the pictorialists was to
establish the photographic print as an authentic artistic object, so
they created products which were close to paintings, in content as
well as in form. such photographs had to stand the test of criticism
as in every other art medium: satisfactory in composition, color
quality, tone, and lighting; having aesthetic charm; and involving
some expression of the personal feeling of the photographer.
The pictorialists’ images of nude models were not portraits;
instead they explored narrative and symbolism and expressed the
photographers’ emotions and dreams. Rather than trying to produce Rudolph Lehnert
Fathma, de la tribu des Ouled Nail,
heliograph, from about 1904. In his
studio in Tunis Lehnert took many
exotic, sensual nudes such as this.