The Body Exposed: Views of the Body

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since this allegedly aesthetic evaluation merely conceals the moral standards of the last century with their long since outdated notions of "propriety and decency".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.