🏛️The Modern Temple: From Objectification to Transcendence. Is It Ever Just SEX?
The camera has never been particularly good at respecting rules. It has photographed saints and sinners, brides and prostitutes, goddesses, actresses, pin-ups, prisoners, lovers, corpses and celebrities with more or less the same mechanical indifference. It records the body, but it cannot tell us what the body means.
1. Hand-Painted Daguerreotypes From The 1850s Capture The Color Of Nudity
That part is left to culture, religion, commerce, censorship, fashion, art history and, finally, the person standing in front of the image.
2/3 Dora Maar with and without Picasso via Unamujerenpigalle Blog / The Big Nudes series, Helmut Newton — Fact & Fiction exhibition, A Coruña, Spain, 2023
Photography inherited this problem almost immediately. The camera could make an ordinary woman look like a goddess, but it could also turn a goddess into a pin-up.
It could transform a prostitute into a cultural document, a fashion model into an erotic icon, or a private sexual encounter into a commercial image. The technology did not change very much, but the context did. The image begins as desire made visible; later it becomes evidence, history, art, commerce, scandal, nostalgia or cultural archaeology.
4/5 Horst P. Horst, Odalisque III, New York, 1943 platinum-palladium print Via Sotheby's / Horst P. Horst, Odalisque III, New York, 1943 platinum-palladium print Via Christie's
The altar has become a display case. The votive offering has become an archive. Even the old ritual of looking survives, although now it may take place in a museum, a gallery, a book, a website or behind a subscription wall.
The Tantric concept of maithuna, ritual sexual union, has often been interpreted through the polarity of Shiva and Shakti, masculine and feminine principles whose union can signify a larger metaphysical reconciliation. The deeper idea is not that sex is automatically sacred, but that the body itself need not be excluded from spiritual experience
.6/7 Boudoir photography by Professional Photographer Oksana Lomnova / Atena Martelloni - sexual wellness and intimacy advocate and erotic performer exploring Eros, sensuality, healing and authentic expression© Sensuali
That is a very different proposition from pornography. And yet the comparison is difficult to resist.
If the body can become a symbolic vehicle, if erotic union can be represented as the meeting of opposing principles, and if visual representations of the body can carry meanings beyond physical pleasure, then perhaps modern erotic photography is participating — knowingly or otherwise — in a very old human habit: turning desire into imagery and imagery into meaning.
8. Helmut Newton, The Big Nudes series, Paris, 1993
Placed side by side, this exposes a persistent human problem: why does sexual imagery so often seem to promise more than sex? Which leaves us with the question that refuses to go away. Is it ever just porn?
9/10 Angel, 1996 Vintage Blue Toned Silver Gelatin Photograph by Günter Blum - Artsy / Dirty Windows #5 by Merry Alpern. Published in Black+White Issue 16, 1994 via Finding my sexuality in a 1990s fashion and art magazine, Archer Mag
Yet, sometimes, “just porn” may be a surprisingly complicated category. A pornographic photograph can be designed primarily for sexual stimulation and still reveal something about the society that produced it. It can reproduce stereotypes while documenting them.
It can objectify the body while simultaneously giving an individual performer visibility and agency. It can be commercial and aesthetically ambitious, exploitative and empowering, banal and historically revealing. None of these possibilities automatically cancels the others.
11/12 Carolee-Schneeman-Eye-Body-Coming to Power, 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women - Artillery Magazine - Contemporary art news and criticism / Eduardo Naranjo artwork via About of Art
Maybe the museum does not cleanse pornography by putting it on a wall. Maybe it simply gives us the opportunity to look at it long enough to realise that we were never looking at only one thing. And perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth behind the modern temple: the sacred and the erotic were never as neatly separated as we like to imagine.
The difference between an object of desire and an object of reverence is not always located in the body itself. It may be located in the gaze. A photograph can invite the viewer to consume the body, but it can also ask the viewer to contemplate it.
Those two responses can coexist, sometimes uncomfortably, inside the same image. Erotic photography has always lived in this ambiguity.
13/14 Lisa with Money Plant, 1939 Gelatin silver print by the renowned fashion photographer Horst P. Horst Features Lisa Fonssagrives considered the first supermodel in fashion history and one of the artist's most important muses / Lisa with Harp, 1939 by Horst P. Horst, Vogue Condé Nast Archives New York via Artsy
The Sexmuseum Amsterdam, for example, has explicitly embraced the idea of the erotic collection, while the Museum of Sex in New York has presented contemporary erotic art within a museum framework.
Brussels' Museum of Eroticism and Mythology goes even further in its combination of erotic imagery, mythology and the history of desire.
These institutions may be commercial, educational, entertaining or deliberately provocative, but they all participate in the same basic transformation: material that might once have been dismissed as indecent is placed inside a cultural space in which it can be studied, interpreted, historicised and, perhaps, revered.
15/16 Museum of Sex Miami Ad / Depicting herself as a muse in a Caravaggio painting, Photograph by August Braquehais c. 1850 Courtesy Daniel Cooney Fine Art
Become a Premium member now and check out the complete publication including the following profound sections::
- The Muses of Erotic Photography
- Sex Sirens of the Sixties - Releasing the Muse
- Annie Sprinkle, High Priestess of Sex Temple
- Betty Dodson: the Bodysex Temple
- The Fun House of Muses
- 68 additional pics
Click HERE for Kabuki-cho’s Golden-Years and Doomsday, as photographed by Nobuyoshi Araki
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