1014
nude to be used by artists. In France Eugène Durieu
produced nude studies in the 1850s working in col-
laboration with Eugène Delacroix. During the Second
Empire, photographers made large numbers of academic
studies of nude models (académies) for the instruction
of artists. By contrast, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Bonnard,
at the end of the century, took intimate nude studies of
their own companions and models.
In Edinburgh in the 1840s, David Octavius Hill and
Robert Adamson produced a remarkable half-length
nude study of Dr George Bell holding a studio pose. In
England Oscar Gustav Rejlander’s combination print
The Two Ways of Life (1857) contained several nude
women, some of whom are shown in fl agrantly erotic
poses. Although Queen Victoria and Prince Albert pur-
chased a copy of this photographic allegory, it gener-
ated considerable controversy at the time. When it was
exhibited in Edinburgh, for instance, the nude fi gures
were hidden behind a curtain. In the Victorian period
artists’ models were presumed to be loose women, and
in this instance the suspicion was heightened by the fact
that Rejlander had used vaudeville artists as his models.
Viewers were also offended by the mistaken assumption
that male and female models had been posed together
in Rejlander’s studio. Rejlaender also made numerous
photographs of individual nudes for the use of artists. Al-
most thirty of these glass negatives are preserved in the
National Museum of Photography, Film and Television
in Bradford; a portfolio containing nine of these studies
was published when the plates were still in collection
of the Royal Photographic Society.
Among nineteenth-century American painters,
Thomas Eakins made extensive use of photographic
nude studies, often posing his students to echo ancient
sculpture. Photographs of his male students bathing,
used for the painting Swimming (1885), are in the tradi-
tion of Michelangelo’s fi gure studies for his unrealised
mural The Battle of Cascina. The homoerotic nature
of Michelangelo’s male fi gures was also continued by
Eakins’s photographs, as was the case with photographs
of nude young men taken contemporaneously by Fred
Holland Day in Boston and by Wilhelm Von Gloeden
at Taormina in Sicily. Von Gloeden combined Mediter-
ranean subjects and subject matter with suggestions
of Hellenic love, whereas Day invested his Christian
subjects with melancholic eroticism.
Apart the production of artists’ studies, there was
a huge industry in France devoted to the production
of commercial images of erotic, sexually explicit,
and obscene photographs of nude models (McCauley
1994). The line between the artistic and the explicit or
indecent was often blurred, and could depend to some
extent upon the nature of the viewer. Freud provided
useful retrospective guidance in this respect when he
characterised the “normal” viewer as someone whose
interest [could] be shifted away from the genitals on
to the shape of the body as a whole.” Photographs that
focused exclusively upon the primary or secondary
sexual characteristics of the nude were often produced
as microphotographs and as stereo images; the latter
had the particular attraction for the voyeur of enhanc-
ing the realistic and tactile qualities of the models. File
BB3, preserved in archives of the Préfecture de Police
in Paris, contains numerous obscene photographs of
nudes and of individuals engaged in sexual acts; this
fi le was compiled during the Second Empire to assist
in the identifi cation, classifi cation and punishment of
individuals involved in the illegal production of erotic
images (Pellerin 2000).
Photographs of naked men and women were also
taken for scientifi c or pseudo-scientifi c purposes to assist
in the recording and classifi cation of information. The
accuracy and taxonomic value of photography was ex-
ploited in fi elds ranging from medicine to anthropology
and ethnology and even to criminology. In the United
States Joseph T. Zealy produced in 1850 a series of
fi fteen daguerreotypes of fi rst- and second-generation
African slaves on a plantation near Columbia, South
Carolina. These plates, preserved in the Peabody Mu-
seum, were made for the Harvard professor Louis Agas-
siz to support his research into comparative anatomy
and body typing (Phillips 1997). It is signifi cant that the
subjects were stripped of their clothing in order to have
their bodies recorded for study and classifi cation. This
troubling aspect of the plates distinguishes them from
photographs of ethnographic subjects, for whom nudity
was their natural state. The non-consensual nature of the
Peabody plates is a common feature of scientifi c studies
of the nude body. It is noteworthy that Freud linked the
concealment of the body to civilization, observing that
“The progressive concealment of the body which goes
along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake.”
In short, photographing a subject nude was itself a code
indicating that the individual belonged to a “lower” or
“other” form, one that was separate from normal soci-
ety by illness, race or behaviour; nudity objectifi ed the
“other,” whether the fi gure was an indigenous African,
a hysteric, or a criminal convicted of indecent acts.
An especially troubling category of nude photogra-
phy in the nineteenth century is that concerning child
subjects. Middle-class Victorians idealised children,
especially female children, as creatures untainted by
society, but this romantic view coexisted with the reali-
ties of incest and child prostitution, evils that affected
the middle classes as well as the poor. Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson commented specifi cally on the naturalness and
beauty of the nude female child. Moreover, he famously
photographed some of his little girl friends nude. Very
few of these photographs survive, and those that do have
been coloured (clothed in watercolour, so to speak). Julia