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photographic nudes were made and police increasingly
used registries to follow the manufacture and distribu-
tion of nude and erotic images.
In an effort to articulate the qualities of erotic
photography, critics note its characteristic proximity;
where nudes are compositionally featured at a distance,
erotic photographs play with closeness as a means of
alluring the viewer. Michael Koetzle builds upon erotic
photography’s tactic of the “strategically veiled,” iden-
tifying the integral role of stockings, veils, garter belts,
and fans in what he calls erotic photography’s “boudoir
effect.” In such images, a closely cropped visual fi eld
constrains the woman in its space, offering her up to a
viewer who then sees her body as would a voyeur peek-
ing into a boudoir, and who may construe the proximity
as an invitation to intimacy with the titillating possibility
of tactile interaction.
Because all erotic photographs before 1860 were
daguerreotypes, they served as pleasure commodities
for those who possessed both capital and space in which
to collect and display such material. Indeed, social ad-
vocates showed the greatest concern for the effects of
such images on the lower class population, as its lack of
education and refi nement translated into defi cient moral
probity. As such, class-related concerns with virtue and
morality increased as advances in technology rendered
erotic photography accessible and affordable for practi-
cally everyone. As models were often also prostitutes,
actresses, and dancers in vaudeville shows, their socio-
economic status only served to confi rm class biases.
Improved and cheaper technology popularized the
medium, allowing the exploitation of its commercial
potential and, by extension, the images it produced.
With the development of the collodion process and other
chemical and technical innovations, the daguerreotype’s
labor-intensive one-offs were supplanted by negative/
positive process enabling the limitless production of
one image. New technology and professionalization
facilitated new formats in which to circulate erotic pho-
tographs, and soon images appeared as cartes-de-visite
and stereoscopic photographs.
Prevailing interest in colonial documentation, eth-
nography, and the orientalized “other” occasionally
manifested in erotica in the form of “exotic” tableaux.
Animal skins, feathers, beads, tapestries, and scarves
converged as coded intersections of the foreign and
the erotic. The relaxed sexuality of Baron Wilhelm
von Gloeden’s (1856–1931) albumen prints of Sicilian
boys lounging in the sun on leopard skins exemplifi es
this interest in the eroticized Mediterranean “other,”
as well as the medium’s preoccupation with prepubes-
cent bodies and homoerotic representation. Baron von
Gloeden’s models epitomize the docile and feminized
eastern male of nineteenth century colonial imagination.
Still, the female body was almost without exceptionthe central preoccupation of nineteenth century erotic
photography. As John Pultz notes, photography itself
attended the shift away from the male nude, whose
smooth, muscular physique had exemplifi ed beauty
since classical antiquity.
Perhaps fear of prosecution or social stigmatization
accounts for the dearth of historical records on those
who actually produced the genre’s profusion of images,
for both the Kinsey Institute’s archive and the Uwe
Scheid collection contain abundant erotic photographs
by anonymous artists. Still, the work of Lewis Carroll
(1832–1898), Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
and Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone Hawarden
(1822–1865) reveals the Victorian era’s interest in the
vulnerability and sexuality of children. Even while such
work is considered artistic photography, soft light and
mirrors conjure a sensual ambience, demonstrating a
shared vocabulary with erotic photography. Foreground-
ing the link between commodity culture and “woman-
as-spectacle,” nineteenth century erotic photography
serves as milestone in the history of a prosperous and
enduring industry.
Annalisa Zox-Weaver
See also: White, Clarence Hudson; Daguerreotype;
Degas, Edgar; Courbet, Gustave; Delacroix,
Ferdinand Victor Eugène; Copyright; Cartes-de-
Visite; von Gloeden, Baron Wilhelm; Dodgson,
Charles Lutwidge (Carroll, Lewis); Hawarden,
Viscountess Clementina Elphinstone; and Cameron,
Julia Margaret.Further Reading
Barthes, Roland, Wilhelm von Gloenden, Napoli: Amerlio Edi-
tore, 1978.
Cohen, Morton N., Lewis Caroll’s Photographs of Nude Chil-
dren, Philadelphia: The Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach
Foundation, 1978.
Edwards, Susan H. “Pretty Babies: Art, Erotica or Kiddie Porn?”
History of Photography 18.1, Spring 1994, 38–46.
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1,
trans. by Robert Hurley, New York: Random House, 1980.
Heath, Stephen, The Sexual Fix, New York: Schocken Books,
1984
Kappeler, Susanne, The Pornography of Representation, Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986.
Koetzle, Michael, 1000 Nudes: Uwe Scheid Collection, Köln:
Benedikt Taschen, 1994.
Mavor, Carol, Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and
Loss in Victorian Photographs, Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995.
McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, Industrial Madness: Commercial
Photography in Paris, 1848–1871, New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1994.
Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women
in Victorian Art, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell,
1988.
Ovenden, Graham, Victorian Erotic Photography, New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1973.EROTIC PHOTOGRAPHY
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