Notes on the Female Nude in Photography.

“To my mind, it is incomprehensible that a branch of the art which provides such unending and beautiful subjects to those who produce pictures with the brush should be denied to those who endeavour to reach the same end through the medium of the camera.” – J Page Croft (1901).

A simple, apparently inoffensive remark: why shouldn’t photographers make nude studies equal in refinement to those made by painters? But what a loaded statement! The assumptions and implications of Croft’s courteously-crafted essay, The Nude in Photography, are many.

Firstly, there is little doubt that Croft equates ‘the nude’ with ‘the female nude’. The two are synonymous. To include the word ‘female’ would be merely tautological.

Then, there is the designation of ‘beautiful’. What is beautiful? Judging by Croft’s accompanying illustrations, it is peachy-skinned and softly-rounded, not only female, but highly ‘feminised’. Any distinguishing marks, any interesting marks, are alleviated by careful lighting, and the Gum-Bichromate process. The two combine to blur all edges and eradicate the wear and tear of the body: the accumulative record of life’s experiences. Which leads us onto Croft’s thoughts about ‘good’ photography.

Croft is evidently a pictorialist, keen to perpetuate a sentimentalised, idealised version of the world. He does not value photography’s ability to realistically recreate the minutiae of surface detail. Indeed, he offers an invaluable tip to fellow photographers desperate to do away with the representational nitty-gritty of lens-based imagery. “The use of a little of the thinnest of silk drapery,” opines Croft, “will frequently prove of great assistance in the ‘destruction of the real’.”

Croft’s article was published the year that Queen Victoria died. It would be easy to dismiss him as a dinosaur. Yet, are his sentiments so far removed from contemporary, conservative positions on taste and censorship, on photography, femininity and what constitutes ‘Art’? Feminism and postmodernism might have altered the tempo, but the visible majority still dances to the stultifying beat of white, western, patriarchal culture. Likewise, female sexual pleasure continues to be masked (literally or metaphorically) by ‘the thinnest of silk drapery’, while a male, heterosexual fantasy of ideal femininity is tediously and tirelessly manipulated in every available media.

“Feminist thinking has […] challenged photo-historiography for its gaps and misplaced emphases. But the issues go beyond women’s visibility or the simple insertion of a female tradition; they entail a redefinition of visual perceptions.” – Val Williams (1996).

The Victorian age produced plenty of women photographers: some ordinary, some exceptional. Increasingly, in recent years, historians have recognised women’s contribution to the medium, and worked hard to see them included in photography’s hall of fame. Thus, it is now a commonplace that Anna Atkins produced one of the first photographic books. Lady Hawarden charmed the Photographic Society of London with her enigmatic, untitled studies of Isabella and Clementina. Mrs Cameron elicited wonder and ambivalence with her large-scale, closely-cropped, female heads which favoured allegorical subjects over sharp focus or recessional space. Moreover, and more significantly, we know that these successful lady amateurs worked against a backdrop of anonymous professionals and hobbyists. Industrious wives, mothers, daughters played an active role in the production of photographic imagery.

A current academic tendency is to re-evaluate, rewrite, the meanings of women’s photography – to claim subversion and resistance at every twist and turn. In this way, formal and thematic choices can be harnessed by persuasive rhetoric in order, for instance, to give a hard edge to Hawarden’s soft, caressing light; or to imbue Cameron’s aristocratic eccentricity with an actively-feminist agenda. Whether or not we buy these arguments, one fact remains: For the most part, Victorian women worked within the accepted moral and aesthetic codes of the day (Cameron might have been dismissed by fellow-photographer, Henry Peach Robinson, but the artist G. F. Watts scribbled under one of her pictures: “I wish I could paint such a picture as this”). If their work was subversive, it was often subtly so.

In contrast, subtlety is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind when viewing work by the best-known contemporary women practitioners, who set out to challenge cultural taboos and representational norms through their photographic imagery. Whether one thinks of the monumentally-scaled colour portraits of Rineke Dijkstra’s New Mothers or Jo Spence’s re-constructed autobiographical record, women photographers are using confrontational strategies to ensure the visibility and centrality of women’s experience. Dijkstra’s pictures are enough to make you blush: the blood and hair and dry skin that make up the mothers’ nakedness. Spence’s self-portraits are enough to make you cry. It is no easy task to face the terrible and fatal effects of her breast cancer. What Spence and Dijkstra have done is replace the eroticised, idealised nude with ‘real’, mortal women. The effect is quite humbling.

“A woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult.” – Lucy Lippard (1976).

Nakedness gets you noticed, and some arresting images of the naked body have recently been made by women photographers and artists. Nakedness is now the dominant idiom with which to re-address issues of gender and desire. Quite often, the body of work exudes postmodern cool – a knowing nod to the tradition it parodies. Quite often, it is intentionally close in appearance to that which it subverts.

Take Jemima Stehli’s Strip. She plays an intricate game with the male gaze, turning the active-passive, subject-object dichotomies on their head. But the game is a dangerous one, which relies upon sexual stereotypes and physical ideals. Though the thrill of viewing Stehli’s work is dependent upon the tension she sets up between titillation and theory, the politics informing the parodic, photographic references might easily – deliberately – be overlooked.

Ostensibly about something else, Malerie Marder’s photographs are nevertheless implicated in a discourse of visual pleasure and desire. Marder has photographed herself and her friends naked, in an ambitious bid to evoke the subjects’ interior lives through their facial expressions and body language. Each picture is consciously and necessarily ambiguous: the more one looks at them the more curious they become. It is unsettling, then, to see how easily these photographed bodies might also be reduced to mere spectacle. Whatever else, Marder’s images expose the inevitability with which one person’s intention is subsumed by another’s fantasy.

Melanie Manchot’s The Fontainebleu Series is loosely based on an anonymous, sixteenth-century painting. Each of her photographs depicts two (apparently) naked women in a bath-tub, and is laden with self-conscious symbolism. Photography’s mimetic qualities, however, force a certain kind of looking and a certain kind of reasoning. It is difficult to maintain an allegorical reading when viewing a photograph, on account of its referential relationship to the world it describes. Instead of the pearly perfection of the painted original, we are confronted with actual women touching themselves and each other. It would be a nonsense not to acknowledge that Manchot’s images arouse desire. The question becomes, ‘whose desire is best served by Manchot’s highly-coded images?’ There is, of course, no conclusive answer.

Stehli, Marder and Manchot: they are all engaged in the production of images which have, as their subject, the representation of women’s bodies and the evocation of female experience. Their work is powerful and provocative, and invariably problematic. The problem is this: any ‘intervention’ within the conventions of the female nude is always in danger of being assimilated by precisely that which it attempts to counter or subvert.

We are bombarded with a bewildering quantity and variety of photographic representations of women. Any attempt to interpret the plethora of imagery that surrounds us can result in simplistic generalisations and tongue-tied contradictions. What remains undisputed is that if women want to ‘reclaim’ the (image of the) female body, they must challenge the authority of patriarchal culture. What remains undecided is: What form should that challenge take?