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A brief history of nudes... |
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Thursday, 03 February 2005 |
Today we'll go back by about a century to look at the history of nude photography.
 From it's ogigins, photography has been closely linked to painting. Mainly because many early photographers were also painters, and also because one of the uses of photography was to provide "models" for painters to work from. Many early nudes have elaborate setups and themes, and follow closely on the esthetics of classical painting. A whole movement of photographers, called pictorialists, were using deliberate alterations of the photographs to make them look like paintings, in their eyes, it was more "artistic" to do it this way. Nudes made this way, with mythological themes, and painting-like appearances were easier to swallow as "art", you might say.
But a movement in the beginning of the 20th century started to oppose that tendency. The core thoughts of this movement were centered around the fact that photography wasn't painting and that is should stand on it's own as an intersting medium because it could show reality as it is. Weston's "Pepper no.30" is a core image in that movement, taking an element of reality and using it "as is" to create a stunning image.
 Edward Weston made a number of nudes of his wife (like my image of yesterday was of my wife...), that were not very well received in his day. They were seen as too erotic, too real, in some way, to be considered and accepted. By today's standards, Weston's images are not scandalous, and maybe that's a good sign that as a society we are collectively moving towards acceptance of nudity, and healthier vision of sexualiy. It's a good thing because in my mind when something as central to our lives as sexuality is repressed and taboo-ized, it can only bring problems, frustrations, violence, even, in some cases. But I'm sorry to say that we have still a long way to go, with things like "Americans against breastfeeding" who are a organisation which says that breastfeeding is an incestuous relation between the mother and the child (no further comments on this, I could get mean...).
People's attitude towards nude images is linked to the socio-politico-religio-cultural reality of those people's time, and the current way of thinking is likely to change again and again during the next decades, I just hope that Weston's nudes will never go back to the "scandalous" category... |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 09 November 2005 )
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