Nude photography

nude photography for the purposes of fine art

Nude photography is a style of photography which shows the nude human body as a form of art. This is different from erotic photography, and pornography which focus on sexual arousal.

Nude Woman in California
Recumbent female nude, Amélie is a nude photograph by Félix-Jacques Moulin, done in the early 1850s

For many photographers, nude photography is a study of the human body, much like some paintings did.[1] Photographing a named person is called portraiture.[2] Nude photography focuses on showing the human body, and often the face is not visible.

In general, nude photography is a planned image, not a snapshot. Nude photography wants to show a stylised depiction of the human body. Photographers sometimes use extremes of light and shadow, oiled skin, and shadows falling across the body to show the texture and structure of the body.

Nude Men are also used in photography, they are just less common.[3]

Early photographers often showed the nudity of women like the one we see here by Félix-Jacques Moulin. Many, like Edward Weston, Jean-Christophe Destailleur, Augustao de Luca, Ruth Bernhard and Jerry Avenaim, preferred to show the lines of a body as a piece of art. They used the terms art nude and figurenude from painting to avoid suggestions that their works were meant to be erotica or pornography.

  1. Lewinski, Jorge (1987). The naked and the nude: a history of the nude in photographs, 1839 to the present. Harmony. ISBN 978-0-517-56683-1.
  2. There are portraits for which the name of the sitter is not known. They are still called portraits, because the artist's clear intention was to paint or photograph a particular individual person.
  3. Weiermair, Peter & Nielander, Claus (1988). Hidden Image: Photographs of the Male Nude in the 19th and 20th Centuries. MIT Press, 1988. ISBN 0-262-23137-9.

Examples

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