20 THE HIsTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy
Nudes & classicism
The beauty of the statues of ancient Greece and Rome has inspired
painters and photographers throughout history, and in the 20th
century the classical influence was used for artistic, political, and
even erotic purposes. Early in the century the nudist movement
celebrated the beauty of the human form with images of healthy
young gymnasts in sunny and pure landscapes, while in 1927
Elli souyoultzoglou-seraidari (1899–1998), known as Nelly’s,
photographed the Russian dancers Nikolska and Mona Paiva
dancing naked between the pillars of the Parthenon as if they were
an incarnation of an ancient myth. Her images of nude female
dancers caused a scandal and also secured her fame.
Where the naked human body was the subject, sexuality could
still be found in privately produced photographs. The German
photographer Herbert List (1903–1975) photographed nude men
in the setting of Greek antiquity in a posed style drawn from
contemporary literary influences, especially Jean Cocteau. These
homoerotic, high-contrast, wide-angle images with naked young
men juxtaposed with antique statues show a timeless and mythical
viewpoint that gives equal importance to a temple and a body. His
images would not be published until after his death.
In the 1930s, political regimes used images of naked athletes
to show the apparent supremacy of their people. The human body
was to be perfect and healthy, the mind free to serve a higher goal—
the subjects’ country. The artistic experiments of the Dadaists and
surrealists were considered degenerate in countries such as Hitler’s
Germany and stalin’s soviet union, and many avant-gardists left
Europe for the us.
The naked body photographed in a style harking back to the
glories of antiquity in the interests of propaganda was most notably
represented by Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). she photographed the
Berlin Olympics in 1936 and her film Olympia famously celebrated
the athletes of Hitler’s Germany in heroic pose; her book of
photographs, Schönheit im Olympischen Kampf, is less well-known.
Her images of beautiful naked men, photographed under a blinding
sun, brought her the approval from Hitler which was to overshadow Leni Riefenstahl
Lebendige Antike (1936). A gelatin silver print of
the German decathlete Erwin Huber posing for
Riefenstahl as a living antique statue, embodying
the ideals of ancient Greece.