SO… PORNOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAPHY OR ART? THE QUESTION WE SHOULD REALLY BE ASKING (Editor’s Note)
So, pornography or photography? Art or commerce? Eroticism or exploitation? The uncomfortable answer is that the camera itself cannot decide. The camera has always had a dirty mind.
Or perhaps that is unfair. The camera itself is innocent. It is the people behind it, in front of it, buying the pictures, publishing them, collecting them, censoring them, exhibiting them—and arguing about them—who keep giving photography its complicated relationship with sex.
1. Reflect Upon This (Round Mirrors), photographic series via Erotismo de Alva Bernadine - ArteRef
2. Mirrors and Eroticism, The Photography of Alva Bernadine – Scene360
The history of erotic photography is therefore not simply the history of naked bodies. It is the history of modern looking. Photographers learned how to pose bodies, light bodies, crop bodies and frame bodies.
3. Twigs, Mirror Outlines series by photographer Alva Bernadine via Bernadinism
They learned that a body could be made innocent, dangerous, glamorous, submissive, powerful, mysterious or desirable simply by changing the surrounding visual language.
This was an enormous cultural development. And this is a glimpse of this history …
PHOTOGRAPHY VS PORNOGRAPHY: A CAMERA THROUGH TIME
(The Camera Has Always Had a Dirty Mind)
The internet gave us LiveJasmin, Chaturbate, OnlyFans and an endless universe of people broadcasting themselves from bedrooms, studios and hotel rooms. The printing press gave us Fanny Hill and, centuries later, History of O or Fifty Shades of Grey.
The camera gave us something else entirely: the illusion that desire could be captured, possessed and carried away. Daguerreotype first. Then photography. Then postcards, magazines, Polaroids, Playboy, home video, webcams and smartphones..
.4/5. Halbakt mit Perlenkette (Semi-nude with pearl necklace), stereoscopic erotic daguerreotype by Alexis Gouin ca 1850s / Lesende Schöne (Reading Beauty), erotic stereoscopic daguerreotype by Bruno Braquehais (1823-1875) ca 1850s
The technology changed, the appetite didn't. And somewhere along the way, somebody decided that certain photographs were dirty. Just dirty - postcards, not erotic or sensual, not commercial, not even necessarily obscene.
As though the photograph itself had somehow become contaminated.
6/7. La Belle Image, monochrome photograph by an anonymous artist, published in the famous illustrated series Le Panorama - Paris la Nuit (No. 1), edited by Ludovic Baschet in Paris in 1900 (Meister Drucke) / La Comparaison (1900) monochrome photograph by an anonymous artist, edited by Ludovic Baschet (Meister Drucke)
The phrase tells us something important about the history of erotic photography: the scandal has rarely been the naked body alone. It has been the possibility of looking at it without permission, without religious justification, without artistic camouflage—and, increasingly, without paying attention to the rules about who was supposed to be looking at whom.
Photography made that problem much harder to control.
8/9 Nude woman in colored daguerreotype probably by Johann Wilhelm Bergstrom, ca. 1844–54 / Architect Carlo Mollino's Secret Stash of Erotic Polaroids (NSFW) - Flashbak
A painting could be locked in a private room, an engraving could be hidden inside a book, a sculpture could be defended as mythology.
10. Carlo Mollino- Secret polaroids series via Flashbak
A photograph was different: it looked like evidence. And if the camera could record reality, it could also record the forbidden.
11. Pamela Anderson photographed by Rankin for Coco de Mer campaign - So sexy zeigt sich Pamela Anderson mit fast 50 Jahren STERN. de
ON THE FRINGE: VIVIDLY IMMORAL AND CENSORED
The nineteenth century is often remembered as the age of prudishness: corsets, etiquette, chaperones, fainting couches and ladies who supposedly never mentioned sex. This is the Victorian stereotype, also a rather convenient nonsense.
Victorian society could be extraordinarily repressive about sexuality while being absolutely fascinated by it. The two things are not contradictory: repression can be a remarkably effective marketing strategy.
12/13. Vintage photographic postcard from the early 20th century, a genre of early erotic and artistic photography via Flashbak / Anonyme, Sans titre Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France © Photo BnF
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- The Machinery Of the Nude. The Brothel As Photographic Studio
- The Golden Age Of the Cabaret-Brothel On Camera
- Brassaï and the Poetry of the Night
- The Secret Archive of Monsieur X & the Sex Archaeologist
- From Brothel to Erotic Magazines
- Dancefloors, Strip Clubs & Moneygames
- So… Pornography Or Photography?
- and over 100 additional pics!
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