1148
PORNOGRAPHY
Origin, production, and market
Pornography is the presentation of the nude body, or
of sexual behaviour designed to arouse the viewer’s
excitement. The tradition of pornographic images can
be traced back to the fi rst-century fresco found in a
Pompeii brothel. In the nineteenth century, the inven-
tion of photography provided an unprecedented realistic
quality, and it was not long before this invention was
adopted to represent nude fi gures, for the purpose of
academic study or of erotic pleasure. Pornography as
a genre shares many common features with two other
categories, viz. erotic photography and photographs of
the nude, and the attempt to clearly differentiate them
has proved extremely diffi cult, for the realism and in-
dexical quality of photography have broken down the
division between the transcendental and the transparent,
undermining the legitimate status of the naked body in
visual presentation. In the endeavour to defi ne these
genres, the aesthetic quality presented in the pictures
and the purposes behind their production can serve as
important criteria: while nude photography displays the
ideal beauty of the human body (whether successfully
or not) and closely allies itself to academic art, erotic
photography is intended to elicit sexual responses from
the viewer, while avoiding an explicit presentation of the
sexual act. In the genre of pornography, sexual scenes
and the explicit display of bodily private parts become
indispensable themes, and the aim is the gratifi cation of
the viewer’s psychological and physical pleasures. Such
pictures have proved to be disturbing to many viewers
and, as Martin Myrone suggests, while erotic art is re-
garded as realistic, concerned with love, and of supreme
technical excellence, pornography is considered to be
crude (in its means of expression), unreal, brutal, and
ugly (Myrone 2001, 31).
Even if pornography is assigned to a different cat-
egory from nude and erotic photography, the three
genres were initially diffi cult to separate, and they may
actually come from the one original source—nude
photography. In 1841 Lerebours opened a studio in
Paris, advertising the fi rst photographic nude under the
name of ‘academies’ thus is considered as the fi rst nude
photographer. The period following1845 witnessed the
blossoming of nude photography produced by profes-
sional studios. Owing to the controversial nature of
this art-form, many nude pictures remain anonymous,
and they are diffi cult to date precisely. Furthermore,
only a small number of photographers are known for
their erotic or pornographic production: Auguste Bel-
loc, Bruno Braquehais, Felix Jacques-Antoine Moulin,
Giacomo Caneva, Jean-Louis-Marie-Eugene Durieu,
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, and Louis Jules Duboscq,
have produced commercially-oriented erotic and por-
nographic photography.
Continental countries such as France, Italy, and
Holland, being more tolerant of obscene images than
Victorian Britain, have been the major suppliers of these
images, and Paris became the unchallenged centre of
the erotic photography industry, exporting its product
throughout Europe. For wealthy tourists, Paris provided
easy access to browsing obscene, bawdy, and porno-
graphic works. Certain studios in Paris would accept
commission from customers to make nude photographs
according to their special requirements. Daguerreotype
nudes could be bought in opticians or from street ven-
dors around a certain area (e.g., the Palais Royale in
Paris). As for the more explicit, pornographic images,
the luxury brothels in both Paris and London were the
venues where these could be acquired. The prosperous
pornography industry was, however, by no means given
the seal of offi cial approval. Distributors of pornography
had to perform their activity discretely to avoid police
interference. Regulations against, and censorship of,
pornography were suggested and implemented from
time to time. In Britain, Lord Campbell, recognising that
pornography was a cause of social disorder, proposed
the Obscene Publication Act in 1857, in the hope that
the production and distribution of pictorial and literary
pornography would be brought under control. In France,
the authorities tried to draw a line between academic
study of the nude and pornography. Nude photography
could be sold, under the title of academic study, but
only within the walls of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The
so-called soft-core erotica could be openly sold, but its
legality was based on ambiguous guidelines, and the
vagaries of the government censors decided whether it
was pornography or not (Godeau 1986, 94).
It is diffi cult to say exactly how many erotic and
pornographic pictures were made during the nineteenth
century, since this production was underground and not
offi cially recorded. Nonetheless, the mass production
and wide market can be gauged from reports of several
police raids of ‘dirty photos.’ One of the most famous
cases is the raid made on Henry Hayler at his Pimlico
studio in London. As the Times court report of April 20,
1874, pronounced, the police seized
no less than 130,248 obscene photographs. Mr. Collette
said the defendant had been for years engaged in this
traffi c. Hayler and his wife and family were themselves
represented in the photographs. The man went round to
dealers with miniatures photographs numbered, and they
were ordered of him in large and small quantities.Across the Atlantic, around 194,000 obscene pho-
tographs, together with 5,500 indecent playing cards,
were seized by Anthony Comstock, a special agent of
the US Post Offi ce, in 1873–74 alone.
Although the market of pornographic pictures proved
to be large, in the early years the audience was limited
to the upper-middle class, owing to its rather high price.