Takuma Nakahira, (Afterword to Provoke No. 1)

                 The short-lived, legendary Japanese magazine, Provoke, lasted for only three issues, but had a profound effect upon Japanese photography in the 1970s and 80s. Not the least of the achievements emanating from those connected directly with the magazine was the publication of three photobooks in the early 1970s by the three main Provoke photographers – Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and Yutaka Takanashi. They remain not only three of the best Japanese photobooks ever published, but three of the best photobooks ever published anywhere. Inevitably, the first editions have become highly sought after by collectors, and consequently beyond the reach of most pockets. But now all three have been republished, and hopefully will remain in print, just like the classics of written literature.

                In order of publication, the three books are Takuma Nakahira’s Kitanubeki Kotoba no Tamenu (For a Language to Come) (1970), Daido Moriyama’s Sashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography) (1972), and Yutaka Takanashi’s  Toshi-e (Towards the City) (1974). The best-known, partly because he is the best-known name in the West, is Moriyama’s Bye Bye Photography, but it is the first book of this trio that I want to consider here, partly because it has been republished in a splendid new edition by Osiris in Tokyo, and partly because, of the trio, it is probably my personal favorite – although by the smallest of margins.

                Similar concerns to Bye Bye Photography are shared by For a Language To Come. Like By Bye, Nakahira’s masterpiece is an abstruse work. Language is at once more lyrical in tone than Bye Bye, yet at the same time more political in intent. Nakahira was both Provoke’s political commissar and the magazine’s primary theorist. Indeed, he was a prolific essay writer and critic from the 60s onwards.

                And it was this dual role which both seemed to trouble and stimulate Nakahira, generating a dichotomy, at least in his mind, between the aesthetic and political goals of his work. Form seemed to fight, and hamper content. For him, the aesthetic never seemed to catch up with the political message. The means of expression always seemed to hinder what he was trying to say in all its full complexity. While good politics produced bad art, good art would result in bad politics.

                One of the most fascinating things about this reissue of For a Language To Come is that Yoko Sawada of Osiris, Nakahira’s publisher and photographic agent, commissioned English translations of three of his essays of the time, which reveal both his aims and his dilemma. These include Nakahira’s text to the first edition of  Language, an essay entitled  Fūkei (Landscape), which had first appeared in the magazine, Gratification, in June 1970, with the longer title, Rebellion Against the Landscape: Fire at the Limits of my Perpetual Gazing. The piece, and indeed all of Nakahira’s essays are heavy going – he had imbibed freely from the fountain of French Structuralism – but remain essential reading, not just in order to understand the work and some of the thinking of the 60s photographic avant-garde in Japan, but the severe dilemma the photographer himself had with regard to his practice.

The essay declares first of all that For a Language to Come is essentially a ‘landscape’ book, but the term ‘Fūkei’, while it meant landscape, had a particular connotation in 1960s Japanese photography and film, in much the same way that the term ‘Social Landscape’ had a specific meaning in 60s American photography, when America’s young guns, like Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand, were referred to as ‘photographers of the social landscape’. However, in the Japanese and American photography of the period, the meanings each culture ascribed to the terms were quite different.

‘Social Landscape’ in American photography certainly referred to the urban and suburban landscape, the constructed or non-natural landscape. So does ‘Fūkei’ in Japanese photography. But in the States, there was an aesthetic connotation to the term, and in Japan a much more political one. The ‘landscape’ that the American social landscape photographers were exploring, with their interest in the so-called ‘snapshot mode’, could also be construed as the landscape of photography. Indeed, at the time, this was seen as more important than the actual landscape, which was regarded as simply the motif for aesthetic invention. In Japan, the socio-political context was paramount. ‘Landscape’ was a largely derogatory term, referring to the massive, and rapid changes in the Japanese urban landscape, especially in Tokyo. The city, as a result of both post-War reconstruction and the economic boom, came to like much more like an international, that is to say, an American metropolis – a subject for disapprobation. So the idea of ‘rebellion against the landscape’ denotes not just the widespread Japanese protests of the time against ‘Americanization’, but ultimately, a call for revolution.

                Nakahira was also consumed in his writings by the difference between image and language. Language’s meaning is precise and complex, whereas an image can only evoke language. He was also somewhat contemptuous of many photographers’ desire to ‘express’ themselves in photography – going so far as to state that, despite their much vaunted claims to be objective, photojournalists also cultivated the false god of expressiveness, by, for example, regurgitating vague anti-war clichés in their work that served rather than critiqued the aims of the industrial-military complex.               

                In the third essay, Looking at the City or, the Look from the City, Nakahira posits his ideal photographer, not quite anonymous, but willing to surrender himself to the direction of the camera and the subject, as it were, and make photographs that are apparently as transparent as they can be. This ideal, for Nakahira, was Eugène Atget, although it is perhaps ironic that when he held him up as the epitome of non-style, at almost exactly the same time John Szarkowski, nearly 7,000 miles away in New York, was proposing a heavily formalist reading of the Frenchman’s work, lauding him as a kind of Cézanne of modern art photography, the progenitor of the ‘straight’ aesthetic in modernist photography. These were almost diametrically opposed views, the artist versus the ‘photographer of the masses’, as Nakahira put it. Unlike Szarkowski, he argued that, far from being a self-conscious artist, Atget’s greatness lay in his artlessness, in how he blocked, or denied his ego in the picture-making process, thus making it free of any aesthetic pre-conception:

                ‘Because he lacked any a priori images, Atget laid bare the world as the world. But for us, who already fully ‘know’ the world, can we still nakedly manifest reality like this or not? If we suppose it is possible, then there is no other way than to start out by first discarding one’s self?’

                That is to say, by discarding the artistic ego. The self-conscious aestheticising of art photography, then, was inherently subjective, conservative, blinkered, and on the side of privilege:

                ‘Photography ‘as art’ will be placed in the hands of the privileged few. And at the same time, this sort of art-photography will become increasingly divorced from reality and history, and in proportion, acquire an increasingly ‘sacred’ character. However, these few will not be able to obtain the potentiality that photography has by its very nature, to expand our perceptions, and to lay the world bare. . . . .’ 

                He was equally hard on himself. The grain-and-blur offhandedness of the Provoke style was an attempt to get close to Atget, to produce a kind of automatic photography, drained of individual expression. But for many the Provoke ‘aesthetic’ was quite the opposite. It was a naturally expressive style, and furthermore, one redolent of the frenetic pace of contemporary Japanese metropolitan – that is, Tokyo life. Nakahira was chagrined when grain-and-blur became synonymous with the Provoke ‘style’, the house-style, even, of 70s Japanese photography as a whole. He was even more dismayed when Provoke’s radical, iconoclastic, politically charged ‘language’ was happily adopted by Tokyo’s advertising agencies and pressed into the service of the enemy – consumer capitalism.

                Clearly, in these stringently self-critical terms, Nakahira felt he had failed. He had not made an objective exposé of Japanese society, nor had he created a new ‘language’ to challenge the spoken word. He became depressed after the publication of For a Language to Come, and issues with prescription medicines and alcohol abuse hardly helped him to view matters in a calm and objective light, and, ‘probably around 1973’, according to Yoko Sawada, he burned his most of his negatives and prints.

                And yet his achievement with Provoke and in For a Language to Come was considerable and long lasting. Language is one of the greatest of photobooks, and the use of the word ‘language’ in the title is entirely apposite. He has made a major contribution to what is now regarded as a ‘literary’ genre, and one that talks a particular language, the language, not so much of the photograph, but of the photobook. And importantly, if we regard it as a ‘language’, it is a universal language. I can’t read Nakahira’s essays in the original Japanese, but I certainly can ‘read’ his photobooks. I may miss some of the personal, or more nuanced Japanese references, yet the book speaks to me, and moves me at a certain level. And I would contend that this level is a not a superficial one. As with most photobooks, the universality of the ‘language of images’ is more important arguably than the specificity of the volume’s strictly local meaning. For a Language to Come talks about Tokyo and Japan, but it also talks much more widely about the modern urban experience.

                Language also derives from, and marks a zeitgeist, a set of cultural conditions with worldwide significance at the time – containing their local particulars, certainly – but with implications across the globe. The issues of that period included rapid modernization, especially in terms of consumerism and communications technology, a fear of nuclear annihilation, and a – diminishing but still persistent – collective hangover from the War.

                In Nakahira’s imagery, all this is couched in terms that are difficult to comprehend visually, never mind to describe in words. For a Language to Come is essentially about the night – the dark night of the soul, one might say. It describes a largely nocturnal journey, or perhaps a dream. The narrative is not quite as fragmented as Moriyama’s would be two years later in Bye Bye Photography, but it remains determinedly elliptical. Like Bye Bye, like many photobooks, Language is a mood piece, all dark accents with flashes of dazzling light, but to say that is not to denigrate it, merely to emphasize its somewhat abstract, abstruse nature, despite its lurking, nagging political undertone.

                The frenetic pace of the book (again, not quite as frenetic as that of Bye Bye), lends it both the forward motion, and the delicious unease of a film noir. It is clearly cinematic in both tone and structure, and yet it is not so much film that I think of when perusing the book, but music. What kind of music, however? Music of course is such a personal thing – some may hear the ragged anarchy of Punk Rock, others the spiky lines of a Bartok string quartet. For me, it is the even more anarchic sound of free jazz and someone like Ornette Coleman. The jumpy, stop-and-start feeling of Coleman for me echoes the leaps between each image in Nakahira’s sequence. They are by no means straightforward.

                We begin, inevitably, with the metropolis, generally at night, or, if during the day, a gloomy, brooding city. Nakahira never worried about slow shutters speeds, nor using the camera lens wide open, so there is a lot of blur and camera shake, all the technical ‘faults’ we associate with the Provoke aesthetic. It is not easy sometimes to make out exactly what we are looking at, but bars, night clubs, and the Tokyo metro figure in the iconography, which is dominated, above all, by the bright lights of the city – the neon jungle. These lights, frequently whited out by lens flare, are symptomatic of the modern Tokyo, and the post-War Japanese consumerist boom, about which so many Japanese were ambivalent.

                They were ambivalent because the ‘economic miracle’ was accompanied by Westernisation and the all pervading influence of the United States – the country that many Japanese saw as not only defeating them, but humiliating them.

                The repeated flare gives the buildings, indeed the whole city, the appearance of being on fire, and one might suppose that, in doing this, Nakahira, like some Japanese photographers of the late 1960s and early ’70s, was referencing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his work. Near the beginning of Language is an image of a airplane flying low over the sea. Whilst he was careful not to encourage readings of his pictures that were too specific, the ominous quality of the picture might reflect this, or his general concern as a left-wing activist over America’s activities in the region, especially in Vietnam. The widespread protests around the time against the building of Tokyo’s Narita Airport were partly because it was thought the airport would be used by the American military as a staging post for Vietnam.

                On a more personal note, one of Nakahira’s most vivid memories as a child was the fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, an action that killed over 100,000, and which many Japanese remember with as much anger as the atomic bombings. Yoko Sawada recounts that, upon looking at this picture, Nakahira would say: ‘This is a B29. This taught me the meaning of fear.’A non-literal, metaphorical reference that indicated the depth of his left-wing opposition to Uncle Sam, but one dredged from deep within.

                There is a manic energy in the rhythms of the book, but it is not accompanied, unlike Bye Bye Photography, by a corresponding sense of exhilaration, and this makes For a Language to Come much darker in a psychological sense. The angst of Bye Bye is redeemed by its delirium; there seems little redemption in Language, except perhaps for the fact that the fire is accompanied by water. Throughout, the burned out images of city lights are punctuated by images of water, generally the sea. The first is that B29, but other water images interrupt, or change the narrative flow, and the book ends with five photographs of the sea.

                Some kind of redemption my be intended here. Nakahira, as an intellectual, probably knew the story of Wagner’s Ring cycle of operas, which ends with the Gods’ home, Valhalla, being destroyed by fire. As the final opera, Götterdämmerung, ends, the waters of the Rhine rise and cover what is in effect the ruins of civilization, the corrupted remnants of so-called culture. From the water, new life and culture will gradually emerge, and the destruction and corruption will be renewed and redeemed, as the Japanese economy was renewed following the destruction of the War.

                And yet, given Nakahira’s anti-American stance, that might be an unlikely reading (He once offered his services as a freedom fighter to Fidel Castro, an offer that was politely declined). These sea pictures are amongst the unloveliest, but most compelling photographs of the sea ever made – dark, brooding, water washing against coastal roads or over concrete foreshores. So although nature may be reclaiming culture here, the pictures’ tone says that might be merely forlorn hope than realistic expectation.

                Just before the sea pictures comes a diptych of images that I feel represents the book’s climax – a pair of almost identical images showing tyre tracks in sand leading towards several mysterious structures (concrete bunkers perhaps?), above which there seems to be a firework display. The ‘fireworks’ seem to be the result of manipulation of the negative, but it doesn’t mater. They are strange, terrible, powerful images, with an unequivocal meaning – conflagration.

                ‘The fire will engulf the entire surface of the city. There, people will run amok. Fire and darkness. Barefoot people running around recklessly. In ancient times, people must have scrambled around in the midst of fire and darkness barefoot. It’s an old fashioned image but when I envision rebellion, this is the scene I always imagine.’

                From Nakahira’s point of view, therefore, For a Language to Come is clearly a work about rebellion. He was completely involved in the issues that produced the great Japanese protest books of the 1960s and early 70s, books by such photographers as Shomei Tomatsu, Kazuo Kitai, Toshiayaki Kanayama, and Tadeo Mifome. Nakhira, like the other Provoke photographers, was somewhat ‘anti-Tomatsu’ in his outlook. Indeed, in some ways Provoke was a reaction against the aesthetic of Tomatsu, although it must be said that for outsiders it can sometimes seem difficult to tell them all apart. Like Tomatsu, Nakahira attended the Shinjuku Antiwar Day riots of October 1968. Like Tomatsu, he was particularly incensed at the continuation of the huge American military base at Yokohama. Yet unlike Tomatsu, he never made work directly documenting these issues, nor recorded the protests themselves, but made his protest in his own highly individualistic way.

He may have regretted doing it in this particular manner. Clearly, the destruction of his negatives and prints reflected his unease. Indeed, this may be said to be the most prominent case of too much theory stifling a photographer’s practice. Nevertheless, Language remains a cornerstone of expressive Japanese photography, the Provoke era, and inventive photobookmaking. In its abstruse, highly elliptical way, it can also be regarded as one of the most idiosyncratic of Japanese protest books.

Ultimately, Nakahira’s pessimism wins out in this superb book, a masterpiece not only of Japanese photo-culture, but of photographic literature generally. Its worldwide reputation is entirely fitting, for Nakahira was concerned that For a Language to Come should be understood not only in Japanese, but in universal terms.

    ‘The naked body can sum up everything we desire and everything we most fear. The body is the source of our deepest pleasures and traumas; our whole experience of the world is set by the way we experience our bodies; by forgotten but all-pervading infantile fantasies. To be naked can mean humiliating exposure, discomfort and shame. Or it can satisfy some of our profoundest narcissistic needs, the desire to be seen which is as basic as the desire to see. To see another person naked can reassure or alarm, satisfy curiosity or provoke guilt, arouse desire or disgust and often both together. The body preserves a memory of lost wholeness, and carries the seeds of death.’ Margaret Walters 1978                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

    Suddenly, it seems, the human body is everywhere. In the visual arts and photography, that is. In the last forty-five years – particularly in the last decade – there has been a renewed and intensified focus upon the body as a prime subject for painters, sculptors, photographic and video artists. The reasons for this revival of a fundamental subject are various, ranging from an artistic reaction against abstraction to the preoccupations of the women’s and gay rights movements, to the AIDS issue and Internet pornography, and to a concern generally with the wellbeing of both ourselves and the planet we inhabit. Such factors have combined to generate an unmistakable increase in the body imagery around us – especially in the medium of photography.

    Of course, the nude has been a perennial subject for certain classes of photographer – almost exclusively male. Around the time of its invention, photography – and particularly the problems of the photographic nude – added its voice forcefully to the main aesthetic issue of the nineteenth century, the debate about realism in art. The photographer’s depiction of ‘real’ flesh and body hair gave rise to political consternation as well as lubricious pleasure. The disrobed photographer’s model was most certainly ‘naked’ rather than ‘nude’, a fundamental distinction that was to have profound and far reaching consequences on a social as well as a purely aesthetic level. 

    Body Image proposes to look at the rich legacy of nude photography from the medium’s beginnings to the present, in short essays on single photographs, the format so successfully exploited by John Szarkowski in his book, Looking at Photographs. This format has the advantage of not only forcing the writer to be succinct, but also places the focus upon the image, giving the reader something to look at closely as well as think about. And it also enables broad issues to be addressed whilst concentrating upon the specific, taking an image to emphasise a point, be it aesthetic, cultural, expressive or psychological.

    The selection of photographs – from the earliest days of photography to the present – cannot help but be informed by the cultural climate of the last fifty years and recent critical theories regarding the practice and dissemination of visual media. While the selection does not concentrate especially upon this period, the impact upon photographic practice by such forces as feminism, gay-rights, and postmodernism cannot be denied or ignored. We can never again look at any photographic image – particularly of the nude – using purely aesthetic criteria in isolation. Nor can we forget that representations of the naked female body by male photographers – which until four decades ago formed by far the greater bulk of the vast repository of imagery constituting the genre of the nude – were made in many instances without very much regard for the thoughts, feelings, and reactions on the matter by approximately one-half of humankind. One of the heartening things about recent years is that this imbalance has been redressed somewhat, and a lot of the more challenging contemporary imagery of the nude is by women artists, much of which will be specially featured.

    The nude will always remain a difficult and thorny subject, for not only ideological issues are at stake. At root, for subject, photographer and viewer alike, it becomes intensely personal. And the fact that certain taboos apparently have been thrust aside in recent years does not make the subject of the nude any less difficult, for new and interesting questions are being posed daily, not the least by the baleful, and somewhat ambivalent influence of the Internet.. But the difficulties, it would seem, have served only to spur artists on to greater efforts. As we celebrate more than two thousand years of a culture which has promoted, to say the least, an ambivalent attitude to the human body, there is little doubt that photographic, and other visual representations of the nude constitute one of the liveliest and most absorbing areas of art practice today.    

    Hippolyte Bayard was not simply the least-known of the triumvirate who invented photography, he was arguably the medium’s first artist. The process he devised consisted of making a positive image directly on to sensitised paper in the camera, but this less practicable method was ignored in favour of the systems developed by Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. So Bayard contrived this sour tableau. a parody of David’s Death of Marat, depicting himself as an unclaimed cadaver in the Paris morgue, a poor martyr driven by an uninterested world to commit the desperate act of drowning himself. In so doing, he gave us what might be ascribed the first photographic nude, the first photographic self-portrait, and, by virtue of its mocking, ironic self-referential qualities and written caption – ‘the body of the gentleman you see here is that of M. Bayard, inventor of the process which you have just seen, or of which you are going to see marvellous results’ – possibly the first postmodern image-text piece. It is, also, the first direct example of the photographic lie.

    Bayard craftily utilised the camera’s propensity for combining verisimilitude with metaphor to convey his disgust at his treatment – his ‘mortification.’ In modern British parlance, one might also say that he was ‘gutted.’ Clearly, in this startling image, one of the earliest photographs we know, the photographer displays an immediate and sophisticated awareness of the medium’s endemic ambiguities. He was aware that he was fabricating a believable representation of death, not simply sleep, and that both were false. He was undoubtedly aware that the picture depended for its piquancy as an image partly upon a knowledge of David’s iconographic painting, but primarily upon its title, which colours our entire perception of it

    Two fundamental truisms are demonstrated in this title. Firstly, that most pictorial images, especially photographs, connote some kind of narrative. And secondly, that all photographs deal with mortality. Henri Cartier-Bresson once remarked famously that every photographed moment passes into the realms of history at the moment of the shutter’s closing. When he made this picture, Bayard, for whatever reason, was ‘playing dead’. Now, as film-maker Peter Greenaway has observed, Bayard himself is long dead – ‘dust and bones for more than a century’ – but the photograph itself still exists to render its own ironies twice as bitter. This faded piece of fragile paper remains, this not-so-simple snapshot endures, not merely as an ironic, poignant memento mori, but as a curiously fitting epitaph to the man who did not so much invent the process as define the slippery art of photography from the very beginning. Greenaway enumerates both the picture’s qualities and the medium’s virtues (if they could be called that) precisely:

‘This modest photograph so early in the history of photography has already opened up an encyclopedia of doubts and challenges, artifices and deceits, ambivalences, ambiguities and downright lies.’

    The main rival to the daguerreotype was William Henry Fox Talbot’s calotype. Although it had imperfections of its own, the calotype would eventually supersede the daguerreotype because of one overwhelming factor. Talbot’s process elicited a ‘negative’, from which any number of positive prints could be made. Photography as we know it was born.

     The negative was obtained by exposing in the camera light sensitised paper, rather than the smooth cooper plate of the daguerreotype. A ‘print’ was made by exposing another sensitised sheet placed in contact with the tonally reversed negative. When printed, the paper fibres tended to diffuse the image and obscure fine details, thus calotypes lacked the hard edged precision of the daguerreotypes. Their effect was broader, substantially closer to the suggestive, romantic naturalism favoured by progressive artists of the day. As Fox Talbot himself noted, lack of detail was no drawback. No artist, he wrote, would take the immense trouble to copy faithfully ‘every detail in a scene’, and would be perfectly content with ‘a general effect.’ The calotype was particularly adept, he concluded, at capturing ‘every accident of light and shade’, which ‘will sometimes be found to give an air of variety beyond expectation to the scene represented.^’

    If the daguerreotype’s primary characteristic was Holbeinesque lucidity, the calotype’s forte was Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro, a quality especially utilised by the Edinburgh photographers, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. And amongst the hundreds of portraits of strictly Calvinist, Presbyterian notables made in their undoubtedly bracing open-air studio on Carlton Hill – the first truly distinguished body of work to grace the new medium – they made an experimental nude. It is a coyly circumspect nude, more precisely a semi-nude of a male torso in heroic pose, representing possibly (in that Athens of the North) an ancient spear or standard bearer, leaning on his staff of office.  Discretion for the model’s daring is preserved by a tilt of his head so that his features are lost in shadow. Perhaps he bows his head to mourn a comrade fallen in battle. Perhaps Dr. Bell, though named in the picture’s title, did not wish to be compromised any further by this exercise in corporeal disclosure. The real subject of the image, however, is neither classical hero nor modest Scottish doctor. Neither, as Joel Snyder has pointed out, can it ‘be viewed as an anatomical record; it is, rather, a study of the play of light and deep shadow on human flesh.’ It is also a study in male virility, not quite homoerotic perhaps, but speaking clearly of male bonding and the notion of an ideal masculinity. The highlighted flesh pulsates with contained energy, a result of the angular and daringly abstract composition that is the picture’s primary virtue. This is also one of the earliest and finest images to demonstrate a great photographic truism – that potent photographs can be achieved simply by the way the light impinges upon the subject.  ‘Every accident of light and shade’ is not merely the means, nor simply the medium. It has become the message.

    Photography’s official birthdate is August the 19th, 1939. That is the day – august indeed  - when François Arago disclosed the details of Louis Daguerre’s invention to a joint meeting of the Académie des Sciences and the Académie des Beaux Arts. The daguerreotype, a mirrored copper plate coated with silver halide, produced a unique direct-positive image of jewel-like precision, though Daguerre’s method was challenged by two alternative systems, invented simultaneously and based on cheaper paper rather than costly metal. But for a decade and more, the daguerreotype, by virtue of its greater image resolution, was preferred by the photographic studios which by 1843 had appeared in the major European and American cities. Their business was portraiture, and if these first professionals were willing to profit from faces, some were also more than willing to profit less reputably from naked bodies.

     It is not known for certain who made the first systematic photographs of the nude, but it was probably not until 1840, when exposures became less lengthy. The first few studies we know of date from about 1847. Then in the eighteen-fifties, the nude proliferated in France, mainly as a result of the introduction to Paris in 1851 of Sir David Brewster’s stereoscope. Serious connoisseurs of the erotic could now obtain their gratification in three dimensions, an allure that ensured the viability of the daguerreotype long after less expensive and more flexible systems should have rendered it totally obsolete.

     Félix Jacques-Antoine Moulin’s career was typical of early French photographers of the nude. He manufactured both nudes and dubious genre scenes, which can be categorised generally into three groups, defined broadly by the degree of indecency that pertained. Of course, by the conventions of the time images from all three categories would be regarded as indecent, if not illegal, destined for the gentleman’s private cabinet. Indeed, we know that Moulin had a little trouble with the law in 1851, being sentenced to a month in prison and fined 100 francs on the 23rd of July, for images which were described as ‘licentious’ and ‘obscene.’ Of Moulin’s varied output of images, the most ‘respectable’  were the ‘académies’, the studies supposedly made for utilisation by painters, where the figures were posed ‘classically’ in idealised settings. His second category showed poses of a more explicit nature, nude or semi-clothed, and often featured the rhetoric of eye contact or ‘come hither’ facial expressions, while the third, the pornographic mode, recorded sexual acts of every description, exhibiting a profusion and a perversity that would hardly be exceeded today. The picture here belongs to category two and comes from a series of large plate daguerreotypes Moulin made in 1849-50 of young girls aged between fourteen and sixteen years of age. This image of pretty, sweet sixteen-and-a-half Céline Cerf – if that indeed was her real name – features a restrained pose, simple and refined, but there is disquiet in the girl’s gaze. Her anxiety serves to remind us of the commercial exchange involved and the social conditions that drove young working class women to exhibit themselves in this disreputable way.

    Kenneth Clark’s widely acknowledged differentiation between the naked and the nude not only signified two states of being, but a patrician cultural dichotomy between high art and low life, between the real and the ideal. Naked is a state of nature, but not a state of grace. Only fine art, strictly based upon classical principles, can give such distinction to common reality. The nude reflects that distinction, the ‘unfortunate body’ transfigured by art’s genius and given sanctity.

    To the nineteenth century bourgeoisie the precise problem with photography was this lack of idealisation. The camera’s fidelity to nature resulted in the naked but not the nude. The human body was revealed in all its lumpen, disproportionate, hairy, vulgar, proletarian reality. Artists might proclaim the goal of faithfulness to nature, but concomitant with this was the prerequisite to transform nature, not to imitate it but to perfect it. The nude was ‘the body re-formed’, in Clark’s words, elevated from the mundane to the sublime by elongating a limb here, correcting proportion or perspective there. Photographers strove to imitate the painter in this regard.  Makers of the ‘higher’ class of photographic life study worked hard to elevate the seamstress into Ariadne, the Parisian prostitute into an odalisque. They did so by reproducing all the clichés of salon painting – utilising painted backdrops, velvet hangings, cardboard columns, filmy costumes, and painterly conventions, such as this large sheet of mirror glass, which not only served to augment the studio light, but reconfigure the well worn theme of feminine vanity à l’Ingres.

    The results of this, though often mediocre, have a certain interest, for it is salutary to see photographers missing the point about the medium – that its potency resides in the very realism which can promote unconventional, if sometimes uncomfortable perceptions of the world, lending new meanings to cultural concepts of truth and beauty. It was a lesson that relatively few photographic ‘artists’ of the nude realised until the turn of the century, a lesson ignored by many until the middle of this century. Nakedness, and the disquieting realities of overt sensuality, were left to the outer provinces of lesser journeymen and outright pornographers.

    Photography, however, was instrumental in changing insidiously society’s perception of naked and nude.  Delacroix criticised Courbet for depicting a vulgar, ‘fat bourgeoise’ in his Baigneuses of 1853, but it was the classically minded Manet, ten years after the first wave of photographic nudes, who in his Olympia (1863) produced the seminal representation of a naked rather than a nude woman, the first painting to present unequivocally – brazenly – a profane, modern, working class trollop rather than a remote, patrician demigoddess. Far from being threatened by photography, progressive painters absorbed its teachings and surged ahead to modernism, discovering unprecedented forms of realism and perception while camera ‘artists’ misguidedly sought and willingly languished in the repressed doldrums of pictorialism.

    Eguène Delacroix was perhaps pre-eminent amongst those French artists who welcomed photography immediately after its inception. Nevertheless, he was perceptive enough to realise that the camera did not automatically solve every problem of visual representation, writing that the photograph should be seen as a ‘translator commissioned to initiate us into the secrets of nature; because in spite of its astonishing reality in certain aspects, it is still only a reflection of the real, only a copy, in some ways false because it is so exact.’ The camera, he argued further, in effect produced a hyper-reality, a reality so perfect – or ‘imperfect’ – that the human eye could not perceive it in actuality. The eye habitually ironed out nature’s imperfections, contended Delacroix, and the artist’s task was no different when dealing with photographs. It was necessary to mediate, to interpret, and he urged students to study the differences between human vision and camera perception. The camera’s great virtue has been to provide ‘palpable demonstrations of the free design of nature, of which we have hitherto only very imperfect ideas.’

    Delacroix’s active involvement with photography began when he met the photographer Eugène Durieu in Dieppe in 1853, and they collaborated on a series of studies of the nude. The evidence of letters and journals suggests that this was a partnership in the Hill/Adamson mould, Durieu providing the necessary technical expertise while Delacroix arranged the models’ poses and stamped his artistic authority upon the sessions, utilising nature’s ‘free design’ not so much to elevate but to enliven. Certainly the nudes Durieu produced by himself are more conventional, while the Durieu/Delacroix studies are markedly different from many contemporary essays at the subject. Without being in the least salacious they exude the liveliness of the brothel rather than the languid formality of the academic dais. This is effected not only by the usual degree of animating blur occasioned by the necessarily lengthy exposures, but by the obvious personalities of the sitters. The contrast in this particular example between the stolid, muscular male and the nervy, petite woman is charmingly ludicrous, and the selfsame sitters exhibit such tendencies in further pictures from the series, both together and alone. The result is a palpable animation, a formal tension, and a psychological intimacy lacking in many early photographs of the nude, particularly the academic nude. As the painter Constant Duttilieux perceptively wrote, the mind and eye of the mature artist is revealed at every turn in these vibrant images.

    ‘The choice of figures, the positions, the lighting, the tensions in the limbs are so singular one could say of many of these prints that they were taken after the master’s own works. The artist was in some ways the sovereign master of machine and subject-matter. The radiance of the ideal contained within him transformed models hired at three francs an hour into vanquished heroes and dreamers, and nervous, palpitating nymphs.’

    This picture exhibits either poor technique or poor direction by the photographer, in that the subject did not remain sufficiently still during the long exposure, and as a result is somewhat blurred. But, as happens in photography – frequently enough for it to be declared almost a tendency – the ill-made image can display, albeit unwittingly, a candour and an expressiveness denied to its more refined, technically adroit cousin. We are reminded by this particular gauche, awkward print that as well as the obvious matter of erotic desire, the state of nudity arouses many other feelings. It ‘uncoils our emotions, good and bad, ugly and beautiful’, as the writer Ben Maddow put it. One basic emotion  - general disquiet – emanates from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. Its roots lay most probably in simple practical considerations, whereby nudity was equated with defencelessness and vulnerability.  But in addition to that not unnatural supposition is the awesome burden of two thousand years of religious proscription, in which nakedness denotes shame and guilt.

    ‘They knew that they were naked’, say the Scriptures of the Fall of Man – a fall precipitated, it would seem, by woman’s naivety and culpability. ‘And Adam was not deceived’, thunders the determinedly patriarchal Paulian doctrine, ‘but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.’ This myth remains so ingrained and pervasive that, in spite of the enormous gains made by feminism in the past twenty-five years, much of the male dominated world, however unreasonably and irrationally, still believes – as Maddow notes – that ‘between a woman’s legs lies the ancient furrow of sin.’

    Taken in the eighteen-fifties, this image reeks of shame and forbidden fruit. The young woman blooms – if that is the word for such a glum display of her charms – only in the rarified seclusion of the boudoir and strictly at the behest of others. Does this indicate she was a servant, or another woman of the working classes, coerced into unwilling service by poverty and the photographer’s largesse? Certainly, few bourgeoise women of the time would have exposed themselves in this way – not even to their husbands in the privacy of the conjugal exchange.

    And yet one wonders. The lack of technique and generally tentative air of the proceedings suggest that the picture was taken by an amateur of an amateur. One thing seems clear. The graceless, but game attempt at a coquettish pose by this homely looking woman – perhaps ‘flat footed with much serving’, as Kenneth Clark observed of a sister model – does not conform to the picture of moral laxity ascribed by prejudiced male commentators of the day to those women forced by poverty into occasional prostitution or nude modelling. She hardly offers an image of the confident, provocative Venus, but is clearly the huddled, cowering Eve, painfully aware of her Christian shame. That, rather than the deployment of low class ‘deviated pleasures’, more probably sums up her psychological state.

    A primary application of early photography was in the field of scientific enquiry, but much scientific enquiry in nineteenth century bourgeois society was marked by a particular inflection. The investigation of humankind was a particular concern, and disciplines as varied as archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, psychology and physiognomy flourished. Such interests were not haphazard, nor fortuitous. Science was an effective arm of the state – a ‘police’ matter, to paraphrase Michel Foucault – utilised not simply as a tool to repress disorder, but to order the dangerous, wayward exigences of human behaviour into a concerted and political pattern. So great attention was lavished upon the ‘others’, those outside the bourgeois norm of the scientific class – the sick, the poor, the psychologically disturbed, the racially deviant.

    Since non-procreational sex – in the classic terms of Victorian and Second Empire logic – lay outside the sanctified bosom of the bourgeois family, the study of human sexuality became a particularly favoured area of investigation, eagerly colonised in much the same way ancient civilisations or remote jungle peoples were colonised in the name of knowledge. Sex, in short, was perceived to be an exotic oddity. As Foucault has observed further, sexual science in the nineteenth century ‘was in fact a science of evasion, since it concerned itself primarily with aberrations, perversions, exceptional oddities, pathological abatements, and morbid aggravations.’

    Such an oddity, typical of the times, was photographed by the great French portraitist, Nadar (Gaspard Félix Tournachon), at the behest of the eminent physician, Armand Trousseau, and the surgeon, Jules Germain Maisonneuve. The subject, described as a ‘jeune femme’, was a hermaphrodite, born with both female and male genitals, and Nadar made nine negatives around the end of 1860, possibly just before the patient was operated upon. In this view, the atrophied male and full female genitals are clearly displayed, pointed out by the dispassionate hand that would attempt to rectify this anomaly, a clear threat to the proper order of things. In the out-of-focus background, the unfortunate patient, obviously distressed by this undignified procedure, hides her face with her hand, a gesture that lends the grace note of humanity with which Nadar always seemed to invest his subjects. Interestingly, Foucault’s thesis of evasion might be tested by the fact that details of the operation were never published, neither in the form of a paper nor a release of the photographs. That may be due to a persistent rumour, since discounted, that the patient was none other than Musette la Mariette, mistress of the poet Champfleury and Murger’s Musette in his popular novel, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. Or alternatively, perhaps she simply died upon the operating table – an embarrassing failure. Whatever the reason, the reappearance of these remarkable images in recent years, the least known in the photographer’s oeuvre, demonstrates that he complied absolutely with Trousseau’s request to make pictures that were ‘la plus vraie et la plus artistique.’

American, b. England, 1830-1910, Untitled (Wounded Civil War Veteran)  c.1860s (Albumen silver print)

    This haunting photograph of a veteran wounded in the war between the States raises questions involving the subsuming of utilitarian photography into the domain of photographic art. It was made to function, not as art, but as a medical report, a dispassionate record of one more harrowing result of man’s eternal inhumanity to man. Any expressive qualities possessed by the image should be wholly irrelevant in the face of such grievous fact, yet they still claim our attention, for they are remarkable.  And they remind us forcibly, as Ben Maddow has noted, that ‘the photographic image, even when by intention the most mechanical, is almost always dyed with the beautiful, minute, irrational gradations of nature.’

     In this case, intuitive decisions on placement, lighting, and timing have enabled the plain facts to sing out loudly, and the coalescence of nudity with fleshly mortification will engender a certain prurient interest – but there is much more. Ruthless objectivity has not precluded an unexpected tenderness. We might expect pathos in medical photography, even bathos on occasion, but the brisk, no nonsense dispassion of the genre seldom occasions tenderness. Relationships between medical practitioner and patient generally mitigate against such niceties, no doubt for good honest practical reasons. Here, the mise en scène of the academic nude is recreated but with very different results. The model’s ‘throne’ or dais has become the mounting block for a specimen. The acquiescent, eminently vulnerable model is not the usual female but male, though a parallel system of social relations between dominant middle-class protagonist and dominated working-class subject would presumably pertain.

    The myth of the wounded, passive, tormented man is a potent one, particularly within the Christian orbit, and is an important sub-category of nude representation, contrasting with the dominant category of the active, dynamic male. In art however, the passive male nude usually connotes self-sacrifice and fortitude rather than vulnerability and weakness. Its apotheosis is the Pietà, where the dead body of the crucified Christ is cradled in the Virgin’s arms, an image that in its dynamism seeks to portend the triumph of the resurrection which is to come. Yet life can often subvert myth, as it does here so comprehensively. The strained, defeated attitude of the wounded veteran may result from his wound, his nakedness, or his nervousness before the inscrutable gaze of the machine. It is vulnerability personified, and results in a profoundly anti-heroic image, perfectly in accord with other photographs of the American Civil War, the first conflict to produce imagery which documented war’s inglorious realities.

     This image is also a timely reminder that the nude deals not simply with eroticism, but the flesh in all its aspects. Few medical nudes (or Pietàs for that matter) are wholly free from the shadow of sex, nor are erotic nudes entirely free from the one ineluctable fact of life. The mortal and the erotic are inexorably linked.