with prominent bellies and mounded hips. The voluptuous forms
owe more to the ancient fertility idols found the world over, the
full-bodied women painted by Rubens, and the distortion
experiments of the prewar modernists than to the fashion imagery
of the mid 20th century.the male Nude
until the end of the 1960s, images of the body were mainly
female and largely produced by men. The photographed nude
mostly followed academic conventions inherited from classical
art, especially in Europe. However, the social destabilization of the
1960s was to form the basis of a new approach to the body.
In the genre of self-portraiture, three photographers of the same
generation broke taboos, albeit in very different styles. Dieter Appelt
(Germany, 1935–), Jan saudek (Czech Republic, 1935–), and Arno
Rafael Minkkinen (Finland, 1945–) have dedicated most of their
work not only to the self-portrait but also to the self-nude.
The work of Dieter Appelt displays the human body in a sort
of geological concretion, a mix of theater, painting, and sculpture,
emotionally disturbing by its brutal dehumanization of the body
through the rough textures of the material used and the unusual
perspectives and compositions.
Jan saudek, living in communist Prague, translated his sexual
obsessions through his photographs, most of which he created in
an old, relatively small, basement. Paint peeling from the walls, one
small window, and the absolute need for discretion were the
limitations he faced. saudek photographed erotic scenes of women
and couples, in which he very often played the male role. He
colored the images by hand, which gave them their characteristiclook and atmosphere. His images, a forerunner to the porn art of
the 1990s, received recognition worldwide after the fall of the Iron
Curtain in 1989.
until the 1960s, the nude male body was represented only as
a warrior, a sportsman, or a model. However, the body becomes
almost an object, an abstract stature, in Minkkinen’s work. skeletal,
almost 6½ ft (2 m) tall, he distorts his frame, sometimes showing
it in silhouette. In his series of self-portraits, his body parts, placed
in nature and photographed in close-up, seem to have lost their
traditional function. Paradoxically. he completely unveils his body,
exposing it with its imperfections, but rarely shows his face; and
he is often placed in the pristinely perfect Nordic landscapes of his
native Finland.
The Anglo-American John Coplans (1920–2003) followed in
Minkkinen’s footsteps in the 1980s when he photographed his own
imperfect, aging naked body, demonstrating the desire for showing
and photographing oneself as if looking in a mirror, undressed,
confronting the viewer mercilessly with the cruelty of the human
aging process.
In contrast to the work of such photographers, there was also
an aesthetic of male seduction whose best representative is the
American Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1998). With a supreme
mastery of studio lighting and large- or medium-format cameras,
Mapplethorpe created an exaggerated smoothness and perfection
in the idealized body, influenced by the photography of Horst and
the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene. The sculptural
beauty—and erotic power—that he brought to his black and white
naked male bodies was unparalleled. Also in the us, photographers
such as Greg Gorman (1949–), Bruce Weber (1946–) and Herb24 THE HI sTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy
Arno Rafael Minkkinen
Abbaye de Montmajour, Arles, 1983
was created in the landscape that
Van Gogh painted. Minkkinen has
commented “It is with a deep sense
of humility that I can say what a
great pleasure it was entering the
skies of a Van Gogh landscape for a
split second.”