Tools
The Body exposed : views of the body : 150 years of the nude in photography
- Title
- Ansichten vom Körper. English. The Body exposed : views of the body : 150 years of the nude in photography / edited by Michael Köhler ; [translation by John S. Southard and Glen Burns].
- Format
- Book
- Published
- Zurich, Switzerland : Edition Stemmle, c1995.
- Description
- 208 p. : chiefly ill. (some col.) ; 29 cm.
- Other contributors
- Köhler, Michael, 1946-
- Other titles
- Aktfoto.
- Notes
- Catalog to the exhibition, Das Aktfoto, held in 1985.
- Contents
-
- The daguerreotype 1839-1865
- Acadé́́mies 1855-1900
- Early piquanteries 1855-1900
- Colonial ethnology 1860-1920
- Pictorialism 1900-1920
- The naughty postcard 1900-1930
- Nudism 1920-1945
- The new vision 1920-1940
- The new objectivity 1920-1940
- Classic glamour 1920-1940
- Subjective photography 1945-1965
- News photography 1945-1989
- Advertising 1960-1989
- Contemporary glamour 1960-1980
- Playmates 1960-1989
- Pornography 1839-1989
- Event art 1965-1989
- The nude portrait 1965-1989
- Variations on the nude 1965-1989
- Prospects.
- Summary
- Views of the Body is the catalogue to the exhibition Das Aktfoto. Like the exhibition, the book seeks to survey 150 years of the nude in photography with contemporary unbiased eyes. A historical study of this sort quickly reveals two things. The first is that photographs of nudes have always been more, and often something quite different, than simply "beautiful pictures of beautiful women". Secondly, the conventional distinction between tasteful nudes and tasteless pictures of naked bodies has outlived its usefulness, since this allegedly aesthetic evaluation merely conceals the moral standards of the last century with their long since outdated notions of "propriety and decency". Having unlaced the supporting corset of bourgeois moral sensibility, its immediately clear just how little is actually known about the depiction of the nude body in photography - its history, its different modes of staging and presentation, and their relationship with the history of art and culture. Now that the boundaries between nude photography and the depiction of the naked body have crumbled, the voyage of discovery to which Views of the Body invites the reader not only leads him through every stage of the history of photography, but also examines virtually every field of application for which the camera has been used - from photo-art to photo-erotica, from advertising and news photography to colonial ethnology and on to glamour photography and nudism. To fully understand the evolution of staging and presentation techniques in nude photography, some requisite background knowledge of both art and social history is provided in the short introductory essays to each chapter.
- Kinsey subjects
- Nudes in art. Nudes in photographs. Art--photographs.
- ISBN
- 3905514478 9783905514476