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Nude Photography for the Beginner

I'm not a believer in painting by numbers so far as photography is concerned. So this, despite its title, is not a simple 'How to do it' article. However I have tried to include in it as much helpful advice on the practical aspects and overcoming some of the problems you are likely to face. If you want to photograph the nude but don't know how to start, or if you are not sure about it, then I think you will find it helpful.

The nude is something that attracts many of us to photography. My own interest in the medium probably started with the illustrations of faraway places and people in the pile of old issues of National Geographic we had at home, salvaged from the home of a wealthy elderly relative as good for our education. They were in many ways, but most particularly in the pictures of half or less dressed native men and women from civilisations around the globe.

Visits to the local library, once I was old enough to enter the adult department rather than the childrens' area, introduced me to the magazine 'Amateur Photographer', which also occasionally featured women in (and much less occasionally out of) swimsuits, sometimes even the newly named 'bikini'. The atmosphere in which I grew up as a small child was straitlaced, respectable, working class and generally philistine. Nude photography was not a concept that could be envisaged, at least outside of Sodom or Gomorrah.

There are still families, districts, towns, cities and countries were such ideas still hold firm. If you live in one you bad better stop reading now, or you may face prosecution or stigmatisation. I've written in other features (see box, right) about some of the ethical and moral attitudes which surround the nude, and need not go into them at much length here, although at times I may feel a need to mention them. This feature will look more at some of the practical issues involved.

This doesn't mean I will be in some way amoral or immoral, or that I advocate such attitudes. I actually believe that the best photography - nude or otherwise - generally arises from deeply held moral principles and strong beliefs. If your beliefs differ and you are likely to be offended by a discussion of nude photography, then please read some of the many other features on offer at this site that deal with other aspects of the medium.

I'm not an expert on photographing the nude. It is something I've done occasionally and I think with reasonable success, but not an area in which I've ever specialised. As well as my own experiences, I've also drawn on those of other photographers in writing this article.

Preparation

You need to thing about how you are going to take nude photographs. What kind of nude pictures do you want to take? There are as many different ways of approaching the nude as there are good photographers of the nude, and it is important to spend as much time as you can studying nude pictures.

Pornography

If you are reading this, you are presumably not interested in taking pornographic pictures. Of course it is an area with a good market - financially the most successful area of the internet, as well as the foundation of many magazine empires worldwide. Probably the photographers do less well than most of the others involved; if you are interested in money, become a publisher not a photographer.

Of course a good grasp of basic techniques and the ability to see a picture are important even in this area of photography, although (or so I'm told!) still photography and movies in this area are very much made to a simple and repetitive formula, using a series of well-worn poses. Doubtless the models know them off by heart also.

Good Examples

Good nude photography - like good photography in any other area - means always looking for something different. As the great art editor and teacher Alexei Brodovitch used to advise (see the feature 'Sixties Style', link at top right), if you look through your viewfinder and see what you have seen before, don't take the picture. Find new ways to look at your subject.

You also need to become aware of the difference between looking at the subject and looking at the picture. Learning to see the image in the viewfinder or on the ground-glass as a picture is easy to write but took me years to achieve, and even now is easily lost. One of the things that makes the nude a difficult subject is that it is so easy to get emotionally intense about the body in front of your camera and react to that emotional intensity rather than making the picture represent some of that feeling.

It helps to look at the nude work of some of the great photographers. Edward Weston, (link at top right,) was arguably the greatest photographer of the nude in the first half of the twentieth century. His early work was in a pictorial vein, often keeping the model at rather a distance, although only a few examples have survived. The great advance that he made around 1920 was in moving in closer to his model (especially in some pictures of his assistant, Margarethe Mather) and seeing his subject in a much more formalist manner, as composed of planes and textures, shapes and forms.

Weston was very much inspired by his models (and often not just photographically) and his photographs reflect their differences as well as his own developing photographic style. The irradiant sensuality of Tina Modotti penetrates his lens just as surely whether he is photographic a close portrait of her tearful face or her luxuriant form in repose in the sun.

Photographing dancer Bertha Wardell, Weston responded to her muscularity and movement, altering his techniques to capture much more dynamic poses with the aid of a smaller and faster to use (still a 4x5" Graflex) camera that he had used for fleeting portraits.

Some of his greatest work came from his partnership with his second wife, Charis Wilson Weston. Perhaps reflecting her personality, he produced works that were at times more calculated, more intellectual, such as the triangular pose in the doorway. Of course this was only one side of their relationship, and perhaps the best-known of his nude pictures of her came from a session where she flung herself repeatedly into the sand dunes in front of his 10x8" camera. More than any other subject, the nude is a partnership between photographer and model.

Another major series of work that reflects this is the series of pictures taken by Alfred Stieglitz of his second wife, the painter Georgia O'Keefe. When married, he was sixty and she around thirty; theirs was a relationship that sometimes embarrassed friends and family by its intensity and physicality. It was so powerful they could not bear to live together for too long, each was too strong a personality to be able to cope with the other, but nor could they stay apart, returning after periods of absence in their favourite haunts, she in New Mexico, he in New York.

Often concentrating on details such as her hands, or using her breasts or torso, his pictures explore her psyche and her moods in intimate close-up. Few of them are available on the web (see links, top right), although you can now buy the definitive collection of his work published by the US National Gallery of Art, 'Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set', which contains reproductions of the complete collection donated to the gallery by O'Keefe. It is a massive work which justifies its price.

The fine online collection of his work at George Eastman House contains several good pictures of O'Keefe, including several studies of her hands and some well-known portraits, but the only nude image is of Rebecca Strand, the wife of his protege, Paul Strand. Stieglitz makes the most of her Rubenesque figure in the left of the picture, her left arm reaching around under her left breast as she lies in the water of Lake George to support her right breast. Reflections from rippled water mask the lower half of her torso.

The nudes of Manuel Alvarez Bravo are very much concerned with telling or alluding to some kind of story. You can read more about him and his pictures, especially his 'Good Fame Sleeping' in my two pieces on the great master of Mexican photography who died in 2002.

Bill Brandt's work with nudes in the 1940s and 50s was ground-breaking. He started in a fairly conventional fashion, with relatively discreet pictures of naked young women sitting demurely inside ordinary rooms that were published in popular magazines. It was his purchase of an old wooden wide-angle camera that led him into new areas. The camera had been designed for uses such as photographing scenes of crime, enabling a picture to take in the whole scene in a room through its wide-angle lens. It gave only a faint image on the ground glass focussing screen, because of its relatively small lens aperture.

Photographers before this time had generally favoured the use of normal or slightly long focal lengths for nude studies. As with portraiture, these enabled the photographer to keep at a slight distance and produce a relatively natural perspective - keeping for example ears and nose in a face at roughly the same scale when taking a tightly framed portrait.

Brandt moved in close to his models with his wide-angle lens so as to make their bodies (or parts of them) large in the frame. This might mean that a model's arm was only half the distance from the lens as her leg, and so it would be imaged at twice the scale. These 'distortions' caused by the difference in subject distances gave the images a different quality of which he made deliberate use. Many critics dismissed the work at the time as ugly and incorrect, but it created a new way of looking at the nude.

In several previous features on the nude, including 'Fine Art Nudes' and 'More Nudes' I've looked at the work of other photographers, including the Czech photographers of different generations Frantisek Drtikol and Jan Saudek.

Among other sites containing good contemporary work (some listed in previous features), are those of Joyce Tenneson, Kim Weston, (Edward Weston's grandson), Dianora Niccolini, William Ropp and Joris Van Daele, whose 'Bare Naked Gallery' site also contains some useful information on his approach.
You will also find many other photographers whose photography of the nude is of interest. It is probably easier to search for them in a bookshop or library if you can do so, rather than on the web. You will find more useful links in my other features on nudes, but searching on the web will often turn up large numbers of highly undesirable sites as well as a few that are of interest.

...more articles >>

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