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helped create the Corps of Diocesan Architects. In 1848
he became active with experimenting with calotypes and
was appointed Director-general of the Administration
des Cultes, by then he was working with the Commis-
sion for Historic Monuments, as well as with Prosper
Mérimée and Charles Blanc. Together they made a vast
inventory of photographs of ancient and medieval monu-
ments in France. Durieu was a friend of Viollet-le-Duc
and Eugène Durieu, director of the Administration des
Cultes, who was an advocate of the paper negative for
recording historical monuments, though critical of it
in other respects. Durieu though, produced pictures of
artists’models, naked or clothed, Arab slave-girls, Ital-
ian characters, and theatrical-style studies. One of his
albums belonged to Delacroix, who had no qualms about
copying the prints in pencil. Photographs, being ‘stud-
ies’ in the sense used by painters, in order to attempt
rendering light, were for Delacroix ‘an intermediary
charged with initiating us more deeply into the secrets
of nature (...) a copy, in some ways false by dint of being
exact.’ It was around people such as Durieu and Delac-
roix that a whole critical theory developed, expounding
the difference between photography and pictorial arts
while merging together arguments for a renewal of both.
This redefi ning was realized by the sudden success of
photography during the 1860s, however it remained
unforeseen at that time. Later a defi nition of ‘photog-
raphy as art’ was conceived, based on the need for the
photographer to make a personal choice concerning the
unity of the image, obtained in a single exposure, and
the avoidance of superfl uous details, of which both were
end results that the calotype process favored.
In 1850 Durieu left the Direction des Cultes and
retired, meeting Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) shortly
after. Some painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
made use of photography without revealing its infl uence.
Others such as Eugène Delacroix, saw photography as
advantageous to drawing and painting. Delacroix was
a leader of the Romantic Movement that rejected clas-
sical formalism and emphasized artistic imagination
featuring the dramatic, emotional, and personal, often
through the use of historic and/or erotic subject matter.
Delacroix had nude models posed for Eugène Durieu
to be photographed and then he enthusiastically used
these photographs as source material. Delacroix claimed
that looking at photographs provided him a greater un-
derstanding about the human body than the inventions
of any ‘scribbler.’ Drawing, sketching, painting, or
modeling the nude has remained a classic problem for
Western artists since Masaccio’s time, but it did not be-
come the photographer’s problem until the 1850s, when
artists began to use the new medium as a draftsman’s
aid. Generally painters and the photographers who col-
laborated with them cloaked the model in paraphernalia
to match the artist’s intention, Master Eugène Durieu,
for example, draped vaguely exotic materials near the
models he photographed for Delacroix.
In 1851 he became a founding member of the Société
héliographique. In 1853 Durieu began actually taking
the photographs of nude models for Delacroix who
supervised the drapings. He was especially known for
his nudes and models and thus Nude photography de-
fi ned as the genre of art photography, whose subject is
the representation of the naked (full nude) or partially
naked (half nude) human body.
The aesthetic value of nude photography and its
boundaries with erotic photography can only be deter-
mined with diffi culty and on an inter-subjectively level,
furthermore it is also affected by its numerous overlaps
with pornography. In consequence, nude photography
and erotic photography always fi nd themselves branded
in multiple ways, and labeled as works of artistic freedom,
aesthetics, kitsch, junk or provocation. The boundaries of
nude photography, erotic photography and pornography
are so undefi ned and continuously changing that they are
always determined and defi ned by the subjective moral
view of the individual and the generally accepted cultural
confi nes of “customs and tradition.”
The nude is a classic subject in art. The early high
cultures (Egypt, Crete, India among others) already
knew nude representations. Its development into other
represented forms can be pursued from Greek clay
artifacts to the art of the middle ages and on to the Eu-
ropean art of the modern age. Since the renaissance era,
the study of the nude human body has been an intrinsic
part of art education at art academies.
By 1847 the nude also became the object of photog-
raphy, the fi rst nude photographers included Philippe
Debussy, E. Delacroix, Eugene Durieu and B. Braquehais.
Models were both professionals and prostitutes, and pho-
tographs were both artistic and “spicy,” which often raised
the aversion of moral and law enforcement offi cers.
In 1855 Durieu wrote a report on the Société française
de photographie (SFP) exhibition and together with the
vice-president Paul Périer began a discourse concerning
the position of art photography. Between 1855 and 1858
Durieu was the chairman of the SFP. board and offered
8 prints to the SF. and at about the same time he was
made an honorary member of the Photographic Society
of London. In 1856, it was noticed that his prints at the
Brussels exhibition had become very pale, while other
prints remained well preserved. In 1857 he left 32 Rude
du Bac and moved to 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In
1865 he lived at 170, Rue de Rivoli in Paris.
The Société française de photographie, founded in
Paris in November 1854, gave no encouragement to
artifi cial picture making, nor to retouching. Its President
Eugène Durieu condemned handwork absolutely. ‘To
call the brush to the aid of the photograph under the
pretext of introducing art into it, is doing precisely the