Erotic photography is particularly difficult to define and delimit. Occupying a fluid position between the academic nude and pornography,
definitions of it have varied from period to period, influenced by
shifting sensibilities and moral standards, and by authors' more or less
overt or conscious intentions. Arguably any nude photograph, simply by
virtue of its realism, was capable of appearing erotic to 19th-century
viewers, so that even the most coldly academic studies were banned from
display in photographers' windows. The exhibition in 1857 of Rejlander's rather chaste composition The Two Ways of Life
shocked the public because the right-hand portion of the picture
presented, with the most moral intent, nude women in lascivious poses.
Nudes were officially excluded from photographic exhibitions until the
last years of the 19th century, when soft focus and the artistic ethos
of the pictorialists finally gave them the right to appear in public.
In the 19th century, the history of erotic photography is inextricably linked to the history of its repression by vice squads, which dealt out more or less equal punishment to erotic (‘licentious’) and pornographic (‘obscene’) nudes, without distinguishing clearly between them. In Paris, the world capital of these products, convictions, fines, and even prison sentences rained down on photographers, vendors, and models from the 1850s onwards, although without destroying the prosperity of the trade.
Explicitly erotic daguerreotypes, usually of women alone in suggestive, Ingres-esque poses, in settings limited to a few sofas, draperies, and ornaments, appeared early on, aimed at a clientele of wealthy hedonists. The launch of the stereoscope in 1851 hugely boosted this market. Erotic subjects, first daguerreotypes, then paper prints, proliferated, the three-dimensional effect emphasizing the models' curves. Gouin, Braquehais, Moulin, Belloc, Lamy, d'Olivier, Dubosq-Soleil, and Derussy were among the major producers of this French speciality under the Second Empire (1852-70).
Initially the product was of quite high quality. Images were delicately coloured and gilded, poses were familiar from painting, and models were young and attractive. But in the last third of the 19th century the inventiveness of this essentially commercial product wore thin, and novelties appeared in the form of leporello-format folding series, booklets, or picture postcards with titles like ‘Parisienne Preparing for Bed’ or ‘A Maidservant's Dreams’, i.e. fin de siècle kitsch. The last exponents of the genre were the specialist magazines of the 20th century, ever more copiously illustrated with suggestive male and female nudes: nudist magazines in the 1930s, then glamour magazines after 1945, culminating in productions like Playboy and Penthouse in the 1960s.
Parallel to these commercial publications, in which artistic aims were never a priority, was more personal work. This remained rare in the 19th century, and was confined to a few connoisseurs. The controversy surrounding the small number of child nudes by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whom a female friend later described as having been ‘in the pink of propriety’, also underlines the difficulties of definition. The photographs of Pierre Louÿs, by contrast, were far more clear cut. Also worth mentioning is the sculptor François-Rupert Carabin (1862-1932) who, c.1890, made over 600 photographic studies for female nudes to decorate his furniture. For these he made the models, many of them prostitutes, adopt poses much more suggestive than those in the finished works.
These private efforts were possible thanks to the spread of skills that permitted both picture taking and processing to take place behind closed doors. The known examples were probably only the tip of the iceberg, since family disapproval allowed only small quantities of work to survive. Especially striking were the 110 cyanotypes created between 1890 and 1900 by the painter Charles Jeandel (1859-1942) of female models, singly or in groups, tethered, tied up, or suspended in poses suggesting humiliation, pain, and consensual torture. In the spirit of de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, this singular body of work prefigures the experiments of André Boiffard (1903-61) in the 1930s, Hans Bellmer in 1958 with his companion Unika Zürn, and Nobuyoshi Araki since the 1970s.
But in the 20th century eroticism was not limited to these extreme cases. On the contrary, erotic work became part of photographers' official output, able to be exhibited and published. Clearly this development, the result of a more libertarian climate, was not limited to photography, but extended to all forms of artistic expression. Eroticism became a significant element of artistic production and, accepted as such, accompanied all photography's major developments, as well as becoming a field in its own right. It made its mark in portraiture, for example Bettina Rheims's images of stars, and above all fashion photography, thanks particularly to the influence of Guy Bourdin, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Helmut Newton. But as erotic photography, unlike pornography, was no longer confined to a kind of ghetto, most great 20th-century photographers tried their hand at it. In some cases it became central to their work.
It was after the First World War that erotic photography was treated as a legitimate genre by photographers whose artistic standing was no longer in any doubt. The series of portraits, nudes, and anatomical close-ups by Alfred Stieglitz of his wife (from 1924) Georgia O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1933 have an astonishing intimacy. Particularly notable in the inter-war period was the work of Brassaï, who created both realistic scenes of prostitutes with their clients and magnificent, sculptural female nudes. Man Ray, Germaine Krull, František Drtikol, Paul Outerbridge, Albert Rudomine, Roger Parry, and Edward Weston dignified the genre by producing highly wrought studio nudes often—another new departure—with identifiable models.
Open-air nudity, often treated in a mediocre way by French and German nudist reviews in the 1920s and 1930s, found its ultimate exponent in Lucien Clergue. His famous series of very sensuous female nudes photographed on the beaches of the Camargue in the 1960s and 1970s connected both with the return to nature extolled by the hippie movement and with the spreading fashion for holidays by the sea. Thanks to his printing technique, which emphasized both highlights and texture, the naked female body on the beach or in the waves became a new erotic stereotype. Much more sexually explicit, on the other hand, was the work of Ralph Gibson in the USA and, as already noted, Araki in Japan. Private image-making continued in parallel. Catherine Millet, for example, in her autobiographical Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), described bouts of erotic photography as part of the “couple culture” shared with her husband Jacques Henric.
Homoerotic photography, which flouted two taboos at once, first appeared in the work of Fred Holland Day. His staged scenes featuring himself as the suffering and dying Christ heralded a genre in which, from Pierre Molinier (1900-76) to Robert Mapplethorpe, eros and death are intimately linked in self-portraits and other works by homosexual photographers. At the same time, connoisseurs like Oscar Wilde were being offered pseudo-classical portraits of Taormina youths by Wilhelm von Gloeden. Molinier, influenced by Surrealism, was staging his transvestite fantasies already in the 1950s. But it was in the 1970s, with the explosion of gay culture, that the boldest works were created: by Bruce Weber (b. 1946) and above all Mapplethorpe, who depicted young black men with magnificent physiques in a style of impeccable, frigid classicism.
Today it is difficult to separate erotic photography as described above from the sexual imagery omnipresent in art, cinema, advertising, and photography. A subject that formerly had a distinct identity has become absorbed into many oeuvres, from those of Witkin and Goldin to a whole new generation of European, American, and Far Eastern photographers, and lost its autonomy and singular energy in the process.
In the 19th century, the history of erotic photography is inextricably linked to the history of its repression by vice squads, which dealt out more or less equal punishment to erotic (‘licentious’) and pornographic (‘obscene’) nudes, without distinguishing clearly between them. In Paris, the world capital of these products, convictions, fines, and even prison sentences rained down on photographers, vendors, and models from the 1850s onwards, although without destroying the prosperity of the trade.
Explicitly erotic daguerreotypes, usually of women alone in suggestive, Ingres-esque poses, in settings limited to a few sofas, draperies, and ornaments, appeared early on, aimed at a clientele of wealthy hedonists. The launch of the stereoscope in 1851 hugely boosted this market. Erotic subjects, first daguerreotypes, then paper prints, proliferated, the three-dimensional effect emphasizing the models' curves. Gouin, Braquehais, Moulin, Belloc, Lamy, d'Olivier, Dubosq-Soleil, and Derussy were among the major producers of this French speciality under the Second Empire (1852-70).
Initially the product was of quite high quality. Images were delicately coloured and gilded, poses were familiar from painting, and models were young and attractive. But in the last third of the 19th century the inventiveness of this essentially commercial product wore thin, and novelties appeared in the form of leporello-format folding series, booklets, or picture postcards with titles like ‘Parisienne Preparing for Bed’ or ‘A Maidservant's Dreams’, i.e. fin de siècle kitsch. The last exponents of the genre were the specialist magazines of the 20th century, ever more copiously illustrated with suggestive male and female nudes: nudist magazines in the 1930s, then glamour magazines after 1945, culminating in productions like Playboy and Penthouse in the 1960s.
Parallel to these commercial publications, in which artistic aims were never a priority, was more personal work. This remained rare in the 19th century, and was confined to a few connoisseurs. The controversy surrounding the small number of child nudes by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), whom a female friend later described as having been ‘in the pink of propriety’, also underlines the difficulties of definition. The photographs of Pierre Louÿs, by contrast, were far more clear cut. Also worth mentioning is the sculptor François-Rupert Carabin (1862-1932) who, c.1890, made over 600 photographic studies for female nudes to decorate his furniture. For these he made the models, many of them prostitutes, adopt poses much more suggestive than those in the finished works.
These private efforts were possible thanks to the spread of skills that permitted both picture taking and processing to take place behind closed doors. The known examples were probably only the tip of the iceberg, since family disapproval allowed only small quantities of work to survive. Especially striking were the 110 cyanotypes created between 1890 and 1900 by the painter Charles Jeandel (1859-1942) of female models, singly or in groups, tethered, tied up, or suspended in poses suggesting humiliation, pain, and consensual torture. In the spirit of de Sade and Sacher-Masoch, this singular body of work prefigures the experiments of André Boiffard (1903-61) in the 1930s, Hans Bellmer in 1958 with his companion Unika Zürn, and Nobuyoshi Araki since the 1970s.
But in the 20th century eroticism was not limited to these extreme cases. On the contrary, erotic work became part of photographers' official output, able to be exhibited and published. Clearly this development, the result of a more libertarian climate, was not limited to photography, but extended to all forms of artistic expression. Eroticism became a significant element of artistic production and, accepted as such, accompanied all photography's major developments, as well as becoming a field in its own right. It made its mark in portraiture, for example Bettina Rheims's images of stars, and above all fashion photography, thanks particularly to the influence of Guy Bourdin, Erwin Blumenfeld, and Helmut Newton. But as erotic photography, unlike pornography, was no longer confined to a kind of ghetto, most great 20th-century photographers tried their hand at it. In some cases it became central to their work.
It was after the First World War that erotic photography was treated as a legitimate genre by photographers whose artistic standing was no longer in any doubt. The series of portraits, nudes, and anatomical close-ups by Alfred Stieglitz of his wife (from 1924) Georgia O'Keeffe between 1917 and 1933 have an astonishing intimacy. Particularly notable in the inter-war period was the work of Brassaï, who created both realistic scenes of prostitutes with their clients and magnificent, sculptural female nudes. Man Ray, Germaine Krull, František Drtikol, Paul Outerbridge, Albert Rudomine, Roger Parry, and Edward Weston dignified the genre by producing highly wrought studio nudes often—another new departure—with identifiable models.
Open-air nudity, often treated in a mediocre way by French and German nudist reviews in the 1920s and 1930s, found its ultimate exponent in Lucien Clergue. His famous series of very sensuous female nudes photographed on the beaches of the Camargue in the 1960s and 1970s connected both with the return to nature extolled by the hippie movement and with the spreading fashion for holidays by the sea. Thanks to his printing technique, which emphasized both highlights and texture, the naked female body on the beach or in the waves became a new erotic stereotype. Much more sexually explicit, on the other hand, was the work of Ralph Gibson in the USA and, as already noted, Araki in Japan. Private image-making continued in parallel. Catherine Millet, for example, in her autobiographical Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), described bouts of erotic photography as part of the “couple culture” shared with her husband Jacques Henric.
Homoerotic photography, which flouted two taboos at once, first appeared in the work of Fred Holland Day. His staged scenes featuring himself as the suffering and dying Christ heralded a genre in which, from Pierre Molinier (1900-76) to Robert Mapplethorpe, eros and death are intimately linked in self-portraits and other works by homosexual photographers. At the same time, connoisseurs like Oscar Wilde were being offered pseudo-classical portraits of Taormina youths by Wilhelm von Gloeden. Molinier, influenced by Surrealism, was staging his transvestite fantasies already in the 1950s. But it was in the 1970s, with the explosion of gay culture, that the boldest works were created: by Bruce Weber (b. 1946) and above all Mapplethorpe, who depicted young black men with magnificent physiques in a style of impeccable, frigid classicism.
Today it is difficult to separate erotic photography as described above from the sexual imagery omnipresent in art, cinema, advertising, and photography. A subject that formerly had a distinct identity has become absorbed into many oeuvres, from those of Witkin and Goldin to a whole new generation of European, American, and Far Eastern photographers, and lost its autonomy and singular energy in the process.
— Sylvie Aubenas
