The camera has never been particularly good at respecting boundaries…
It photographs saints and sinners, fashion models and criminals, landscapes and lovers. It records weddings, wars, advertisements, crime scenes, family holidays—and naked bodies. Sometimes it documents. Sometimes it seduces. Sometimes it sells. Sometimes it pretends not to be doing any of the above.
1. Models often pose like Venus for photo shoots: Candice Huffine posing for Harper’s Bazaar via @rosybvm
2/3 British professional polo player Sophia Burrell posed naked in a mock-up of Botticelli's painting of The Birth of Venus for Country Life in 1999 / Digital edit of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus - Lady Gaga wearing her iconic seashell bra from the ARTPOP era
When does a photograph of a naked body become art, when does it become pornography? Perhaps that is the wrong question. Perhaps the more interesting question is: what are we doing when we look?
Because before photography, before cinema, before magazines and subscription platforms, before the glossy centre fold and the smartphone screen, human beings were already making images of bodies and offering them to something larger than themselves.
4/5 Antique Prints & Drawings, French Erotic Daguerreotype - Female Nude - La Muse Heliogravure, 1930 / Antique Prints & Drawings, French Erotic Daguerreotype - Female Nude La Soubrette, Original heliogravure based on an erotic daguerreotype made in 1880
A god. A goddess. A lover. A fertility cult. A marketplace. The community. The self. Maybe every work of art is, in some strange way, an ex-voto: an offering made visible.
The Latin phrase ‘ex voto suscepto’ refers to a vow fulfilled—a gift offered in consecration, thanksgiving or in recognition of a promise. Across religious traditions, votive offerings have taken countless forms: paintings, sculptures, wax figures, carved body parts, objects, gestures and rituals.
The body itself could become the subject of the offering, particularly when an illness had been healed or a prayer answered.
6/7 La Prière, 1930 Prayer by Man Ray via Christie's / Lee Miller, Nude bent forward (thought to be Noma Rathner), Paris, ca. 1930 via Aperture
The logic is beautifully simple. Now replace the saint with Aphrodite, the wax limb with a photograph, the chapel with a gallery, and the prayer with desire.
The distance between the sacred and the erotic suddenly becomes rather less comfortable. Perhaps we have been making hymns to the body all along. And sometimes those hymns look suspiciously like pornography…
8/9 Portrait of a Young Woman with Bare Breasts, c.1947 by Vincenzo Balocchi / Top model Ashley Graham photographed by Mario Sorrenti for a 2017 feature in V Magazine
‘Pornography is sometimes characterised as the symptom of a degenerate society, but anyone even noddingly familiar with Greek vases or statues on ancient Hindu temples will know that so-called unnatural sex acts, orgies and all manner of complex liaisons have for millennia past been represented in art for the pleasure and inspiration of the viewer everywhere...
10/11 Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász ), Matisse drawing a reclining model, Villa d’Alésia, Paris, 1939. Silver gelatin print, Grob Gallery Genève via Artsy / Maryam Eisler, The Divine Feminine from the Eurydice in Provence series, 2016 Giclee print (detail)
12/13 Bill Brandt, Nude & Stones (east Sussex), 1978, Magnificent Nudes at Sotheby's / Model and body activist Ashley Graham in 2017 photograph by Mario Sorenti, promoting her new book A New Model What Confidence, Beauty, and Power Really Look Like
... The desire to ponder images of love-making is clearly innate in the human – perhaps particularly the male – psyche.’— Tom Hodgkinson
THE GODDESS HAS ALWAYS BEEN NAKED
The word pornography itself comes from the Greek πορνογράφος (pornográphos - writing of harlots), traditionally understood through pornē, prostitute, and graphein, to write or draw. In its earliest conceptual form, pornography was connected to the representation or description of prostitution, but the definition becomes slippery soon enough.
14/15 Nan Goldin, Eternal Spring, Rodin - You never did anything wrong, Gagosian Exhibition 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Collection. Credits Musée Magazine / Nan Goldin, Joey with Hermaphrodite- You never did anything wrong, Gagosian Exhibition 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Collection. Credits Musée Magazine
Because the ancient world did not always draw the modern Western line between sexuality, religion, ritual and representation. The historical material concerning so-called “sacred prostitution” is particularly complicated.
Ancient writers - Herodotus and Strabo among others,- described sexual rites associated with temples and fertility cults, including traditions connected with Aphrodite and other goddesses.
16/17 Mario Sorrenti-Hungarian model Eniko Mihalik with the hands of an old woman. On the right, the photographer and his muse, Kate Moss © Mario Sorrenti artpartners via Stern.de / Penny Slinger, Tantric Reunions, 1976 Photo collage on paper by pioneering feminist surrealist and author of a book on the ancient practice of Tantra via Elephant
The fantasy of the sacred prostitute has itself become a powerful cultural image - the woman who is simultaneously sexual and divine. The body that is both temple and temptation, the whore who becomes priestess. The erotic act transmuted into ritual.
And somewhere between these sits the ‘hieros gamos’, the “sacred marriage”, ritualic representation of union between divine or royal figures, symbolising fertility, cosmic balance or the union of heaven and earth.
Become a Premium member now and check out the complete publication including:
- The Architecture of Reverence: From Objectification to Transcendence: Is It Ever Just Porn?)
- From Sacred Temple to Glossy Magazine Institution
- The Last Session With the Goddess…
- Madonna: the Ex Voto Goes Pop
- Gazing At the Goddess
- So, Pornography, Photography, Ex Voto?
- So... It Is Art. The Gallery Wall Is Not a Magic Spell
- 84 additional pics!
Click HERE for Volume I or HERE for Ellen von Unwerth's dominance of conventional femininity
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