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Stories
A Brief Intro to Early Erotic Photography
Posted on 11/12/2014
1839: Louis J.M. Daguerre publicly announces that he has found a method of developing permanent photographic plates. The painter Paul Delaroche declares: "From today, painting is dead!"
This statement turned out to be an exaggeration, but it's obvious that photography dramatically changed how we communicate the world around us. Artists like Delaroche saw it both as a threat to their livelihoods and as an inferior medium that would never capture the nuances of painting. Painting as a whole did survive of course (though most portraitists of the day had to switch to photography or find themselves out of work), but photography eclipsed it quickly in several key realms. Among others, portraiture, journalism, and what we're concerned with here - pictures of naked people.
The first nude 'photographs' were daguerreotypes (named for the aforementioned Daguerre) - an image printed directly onto a polished silver plate coated with silver halide. They had their limitations: each daguerreotype was a one-off image that could not be reproduced and the exposure times could run upwards of 10 minutes, not ideal for human subjects. However, they produced beautiful, haunting pictures that did not fade over time. Many were delicately hand-tinted and colored by the photographers, often formerly painters themselves.
The vast majority of nude daguerreotypes were produced in 1840-1850s France and could cost buyers the modern equivalent of $1000. Most of these were first created as 'nude studies' or 'academies' ostensibly as nude references for painters but really designed for a, uh... wider audience. They were, as author Aaron Scharf has stated, "information for artists and pleasure for voluptuaries".
Keeping in line with artistic conventions, a lot of the early nudes you'll see here contain historical & mythological themes or at least have elements (folding drapery, idyllic woodland scenes, dildos, etc) that were found in the portraits of the day. The idea being to provide a glimmer of respectability (and in those times, legality) to what are essentially erotic prints.
In the 1850s and following decades, improved photo techniques started cropping up rapidly - Henry Talbot's calotype, Fredrick Scott Archer's collodion process, the ambrotype, the tintype, et cetera, each one an improvement over the last. Unlike the single-use daguerreotype, many of these allowed photographers to create multiple positive prints from an original negative. And so the lovely yet difficult and very expensive daguerreotype was phased out. Materials became cheaper and the developing easier, and photographic nudes were able to reach a larger audience.
The academies gained in popularity along with mass-produced saucy postcards (a thriving industry in Paris in the late 1800s, though most were illegal to actually send and thus simply called 'postcards' because of their size). They were available through street vendors, select bookstores, tobacco shops, and other merchants who were off the beaten path and better able to avoid official oversight.
More and more photographers began producing more and more explicitly erotic material, photos that made no pretensions towards 'art' (check out the hardcore sex archives). This trend brought the wrath of the authorities down on many erotic book & photo sellers. Remember, this was the Victorian age in England, and its rigid moral system hung over most of the Western world. Forget about America... almost everything of a sexual nature there, including works now considered masterpieces, was subject to seizure and its possessors open to prosecution. Hence we have few early erotic images by American photographers.
The case was similar, if slightly less severe, in England. Even in France, which has always been comparatively open in its attitudes towards sexual matters, dealers regularly incurred the unwelcome attention of various authorities. In August 1900, gendarmes (French military police) raided shops and studios throughout Paris and confiscated over 80,000 erotic photos. Still, the intrepid erotic photographers weren't fazed by the late-summer crackdown. They simply relocated and made an extra effort to use anonymous backgrounds that wouldn't give away the location of the photo shoot.
And that's basically how it's been with erotica in western European & American culture thru the ages: a defiant minority produces it, the population at large uses it, and all the while the powers-that-be try to suppress it. The mediums change, but steamy pictures always seem to get someone upset, whether they're done in oil, celluloid, or Polaroid.
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