waves or rocks, and made full use of the strong light of southern
Europe. For Gibson, the erotic power of the nude originated from
the way the body was dressed or from the detail of its movements.
His fragmented perspective proved his love of both abstraction and
mystery. One could say that the difference between the true erotic
image and pornography is mystery; the covered legs of a woman
can be more sensual than those of a naked woman.
David Hamilton, extremely popular in the 1970s and early 1980s,
influenced a generation of amateur photographers with his dreamlikeimages of young and innocent girls at the point of discovering their
sexuality. The absence of makeup, and the use of soft tones and
colors, gentle light, and timeless accessories, conjure up a feeling
almost everyone has had at some point in their life: the longing for
the perfect, for the promise. More successfully than anyone before
him, Hamilton understood the appeal of this promise, an aspiration
that advertising photography also loves to invoke.
The American photographer Joël-Peter Witkin (1939–) seems to
be in search of mystery as much in the photographic technique as
in the human body. He has stated: “I rebuild the
negative, I tickle it, I add signs, and I erase parts of it
... I redesign the image, I make it more powerful, more
mysterious.” Born in Brooklyn to a Jewish mother and
a Catholic father, at the age of six Witkin saw a
gruesome car accident that shaped his photographic
universe. After studying art history and photography,
he embarked on making images with elaborate,
complex settings, borrowed from sources as diverse
as mythology, Man Ray, de Chirico, still lifes from the
16th and 17th centuries, 19th-century realism and
numerous pictorial artists—his meeting with Diane
Arbus shortly before her suicide particularly influenced
him. His images of physical deformities and parts of
cadavers have often caused outrage. Witkin explores
his own sexual universe and dares to show us the
“beauty” of the body we are afraid to look at, creating
his images in large format in the studio, always after a
lengthy preparation. The reality of Witkin’s naked
bodies has been very influential in art photography.
While Witkin uses cameras of a type that date back
more than a hundred years, technology has had a big
impact on the way that many photographers make
images. Modern cameras with automatic functions
have considerably reduced the time it takes to create
a photograph, and some are produced with an
electronic date inscription showing exactly the
moment at which the shutter was opened. This has
encouraged the production of intimate visual diaries,
which has resulted in some artists experiencing
situations only to make images of them. In the West,
the work of the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi
Araki (1940–) is often thought of only in relation to its
sadomasochism but, by the constant use of a
compact mini-camera with a date indicator, he creates
a fascinating journal of desire.26 THE HI sTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy
Ralph Gibson
Eye, Ass (1975). For Gibson, creating dynamism in his
photographs means eliminating every element until
nothing is left in the frame except what he wants.