shocked British society loose from their tightly
grasped tenants of morality. Literature and the
visual arts reacted immediately with a new sense of
sexual liberalism. Earlier English publications of ero-
tic photos included magazines such asPhoto Bits,
which becamePhoto Funin 1906. Magazines such as
these couched the nude in socially acceptable na-
turalistic settings, romanticizing and idealizing the
nude form.
During the 1920s, shifting moral values allowed
increased sexual liberation and photography of this
time put nude imagery firmly into commercial cul-
ture. Shorter skirts and haircuts for women at this
time became not just acceptable, but fashionable.
Burlesque shows of the 1920s and 1930s provided
venues for those looking for erotic entertainment.
Ziegfeld’s Follies, George White’s Scandals, and
Earl Carroll’s Vanitieskept nudity and racy content
in the paying public’s eye and served to legitimize
the increasing liberalism of popular culture. Printed
photo postcards from these shows not only pro-
moted the careers of the young stage actors, but
provided a source of cheap, racy photos readymade
for mass consumption. Hollywood began promot-
ing its young starlets with magazines likeFilm Fun
providing the public with perhaps the first ‘‘pin-
ups’’ as early as the 1920s. Although photos ofnude
women were very common during this era, artists
who did not wish to be discredited or arrested still
had to originate their subjects in contrived narrative
poses usually imitative of Greek or Roman statuary.
Doing so made the images more palatable to the
public by making them more ‘‘artsy’’ and less realistic.
Implied or even direct eroticism was deemed allow-
able by virtue of a photo’s art-historic context.
It was the advent of the ‘‘pin-up’’ that really
brought erotic photography to the general public
in the United States and abroad. The term ‘‘pin-up’’
was invented during World War II and applied to
the thousands of glossy photos of beautiful women
distributed to American soldiers in order to ‘‘ele-
vate morale.’’ As a general rule the Second World
War pin-up was pretty and her pose suggestive, but
she was still innocent and almost never nude. Pin-
ups are erotic photography mass produced for com-
mercial distribution, as opposed to thoughtfully
crafted, high-art erotic photography with perhaps
more specifically aesthetic or conceptual intentions.
Just as the first few decades after the First World
War brought radical liberation and changes to social
ideas of morality, so too did the first few decades
after World War II see sweeping changes in social
attitudes towards erotic imagery. The 1950s through
the 1970s are often referred to as ‘‘the permissive
years’’ in erotic and commercial photography. The
1950s gave birth to a golden age of erotic art, typified
by the glossy, well-produced magazine spread found
in such men’s publications as Playboy(first issue
published in 1953). The pictorial influence of this
magazine’s pin-up aesthetic has directly influenced
the production of erotic art, fashion photography,
and popular advertising up to the present day.Play-
boy’sformat is probably the most publicly accessible
(and arguably the most publicly acceptable) form of
erotic photography to date. Noted photographers
fromPlayboyinclude: Peter Gowland, J. Frederick
Smith, and later Milton H. Green and Barry
O’Rourke. In Britain, a master of post-war erotic
photography is George Harrison Marks. His work is
pure eroticism with no pretense of aestheticism. He
provided naked girls for boys to look at, offering sex
for sale with no qualms.
Even with the sexual revolution and rapidly
changing social morality of the 1960s and 1970s,
any photographs explicitly depicting pubic hair
were by and large considered obscene until well
into the 1970s. This is even given the earlier legal
battles of English photographer Horace Narbeth
(known professionally as Roye) who successfully
defended his photographic depiction of pubic hair
in 1958 by citing issues of artistic integrity. One of
the most influential photographers of the 1960s
was the Englishman Bill Brandt (1904–1983),
whose bookPerspective of Nudes(1961) was inno-
vative and influential in bringing acceptance of
nudity and eroticism to fine art photography.
The inherent problem of defining erotic photo-
graphy is finding a concise way in which to differ-
entiate the erotic from its more pervasive cousin,
pornography. Many commercial and fashion pho-
tos are undeniably erotic, ranging from subtly pro-
vocative to sexually cliche ́ to startlingly overt.
Subjectivity is a problem for the student of any
genre of photography trying to find a true inter-
pretation of the image. The intrinsic biases found in
the interpretation of sexual art are complicated
further by the way and place in which an image is
viewed. As artist Rod Ashford wrote in 1998:However subtle the erotic motif, when viewed in an
inappropriate context, even images that have the
power to excite can appear crude, obscene, alarming,
or even bland. Similarly, a sophisticated erotic image
viewed in the testosterone bravado of an all male envir-
onment is more likely to be passed over in favor of
something more explicit—an immediate image which
seeks to objectify its female subject.
(Ashford, ‘‘Prurience and Perfection’’ 1998, 16.)As noted by photo-historian Robert Sobieszek,
erotic photography can be seen as having twoEROTIC PHOTOGRAPHY