Looking and Nude Photography

The published words and thoughts of writers and philosophers about our greedy eyes

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It is as though the sexual gaze  answers the most fundamental of questions: Who am I? How did I get here? What am I supposed to do? The answers are contained in the body, if only we know how to look. Not knowing, we look hungrily and without full satisfaction. Some people complain bitterly about our looking, and maybe they should. Any true religious act requires taboo as a way of preserving its sanctity. (1)

Gerald Malanga in his book Scopophilia states that voyeurism in photography implies that the photographer is where he was when he took the picture, in the sense that he occupies a kind of space that encompasses the subject's space undetected while inhabiting the reality of the subject. The power of the photographer's penetrating eye, abetted in a significant way by secreting oneself behind an even more penetrating optical mechanism (hiding behind the camera, as it were, to see more and be seen less, or preferably not at all) is sometimes transferred to the viewer of the photo, thus making him voyeuristically complicit with the photographer. (2)

Not knowing the circumstances beyond the edges of the picture creates an anticipation satisfied only by the viewer's imagination. The sensual, or perhaps erotic, pleasure derived from viewing a photograph of a nude can be amplified by the sense of the relationship between the subject and the photographer at the moment the photograph was made, that instant of release when both give something they were perhaps unconscious of until that moment. Nude, the model is vulnerable in the eyes of our culture, but powerful in the face of my own uncertain intentions. (3) Voyeurism is really exciting because you don't know what's really going on in that room, and what you do is that your mind and your own set of references take over and make your own scenario, when you hope to see something and you quite don't know what you're going to see. Back in your mind you want to see somebody get fucked, you want to see a breast being exposed, you want to see somebody do something. You're bringing to that scene what's in your mind's concept. If you look at it objectively, all your eyes are seeing is two people sitting in a room talking. (4)

Man Ray 1923

At one level gazing at pictures of nudes, whether or not they are involved in sexual activity, may be an attempt to see naked reality in the most absolute terms. Why would such a gaze be so compelling unless it had a fundamental attraction and purpose? The photographer Edward Weston, famous for his images of plain, unclothed men and women, often reflected on his work in these broad terms. In a journal entry of 1930 he describes how a good photograph requires a model's "revealment." the photographer's realization, and the camera's readiness. When these are all in place, he said, "the very bones of life are bared." (5) Kenneth Josephsen in his book Nude Theory states, "some of the nudes I have photographed are part of the History of Photography Series; some are not. The nudes really result from the fact that I love being around women. I've always been fascinated by them and curious about them, although I don't think psychological insights into women are part of my work. In most of my nudes you don't see the face of the woman because it never seems to work very well. The face often detracts from the figure, and I'm much more interested in the idea of the figure as a portrait. I think, also, that with this approach there is something asked of the viewer, perhaps a little work to complete the idea, to imagine the person as a whole." (6) I Can Undress a Man With My Eyes. The feeling I get when I look through the viewfinder and see someone's cock is one of beauty. When I was at Kathmandu, in Nepal, in 1975, everywhere I looked there was a lingam or a yoni, the female counterpart -- a stone with a hole in it. The penis is an object of fascination and worship, but people just don't think of it as a beautiful thing. They think of it only as a sex organ. (7) I sat in the cafeteria of the art school, and to almost any woman who went by I would say, "Hey, can I take a picture of your chest?" Or depending on the person, "of your breasts." I was pretty uptight about doing the project and fifty percent of the time I got a flat refusal. But the other fifty percent of the time, women said sure as if they had nothing better to do and were just having some coffee and why not? So we went next door to an office and they peeled their T-shirts off and none of them wore bras! (8) Lucien Clergue in his book Practical Nude Photography tells us that even before my mother's death, I decided to open myself to life, to try photographing the nude. Frankly, this was just a pretext to see a woman naked. I asked prostitutes to model for me, but when you ask a prostitute if you can photograph her, she says, "What do you think I am?" This made a problem. (9) The body is such an important part of what we are, and yet in most cultures it's something to be ashamed of. It's always hidden under clothing and yet it's the ultimate curiosity. Because we have lost a lot of our naturalness about the body, many of our responses are artificial. We seem to forget that it's all right to look at bodies, it's all right to enjoy another figure. We are embarrassed about what we should be proud of. Instead, our interest in looking at the body, in admiring the body, should be expressed with an openness and joy. For a long time it was definitely considered poor test to describe a male nude as being beautiful. Man have always been very nervous about this type of reference, Yet, gyms are filled with men developing their bodies, making themselves beautiful. (10)

Many pictures of the nude go beyond the erotic and are pure beauty. I'm much more interested in a kind of abrasiveness which is at its most exciting in spontaneous circumstances. I saw a woman on the beach who was very exciting in the way she moved. She had no idea she was being observed. She was relaxed. It was totally erotic. With me there is a voyeuristic element involved. Of course, the trouble with a very controlled nude is that it is not voyeuristic anymore. The immediacy is lost (11) If I see someone who is particularly sensual, whether the person's clothed or unclothed, it will stimulate an aesthetic rather than a sexual thought. I want to carry it out graphically as opposed to make love or have a sexual affair. I may see a woman that has a certain quality, that's sexual and aesthetic simultaneously.

So I'll want to photograph that woman in bringing out an artistic idea more than necessarily making love to her. But I personally equate the making of the photograph to the making of love. In other words, the intensity or passion that I feel about the aesthetic and graphic aspect of the photo is a sublimation of a sexual desire. So I end up making pictures more than making love. (12)


In his 1986 study of nineteen-century French photography of the body, Andre Rouille makes a useful distinction between the portrait and the nude, between subject and object. In a portrait, the specific body (the person) being pictures is the subject; he or she has initiated the transaction, and the photographer is merely the facilitator. William Ewing, author of The Body reminds us that in the nude, the transaction is reversed; the photographer initiates the event; the body is depersonalized, the object. Like the medical, police or anthropological photograph, the artistic nude is an image made by and for the perusal of others. (13)

It is difficult to imagine in our current context, but maybe one day we will arrive at the point where we can have graphic erotic imagery around us and not think much about human sexuality or feel a compulsion to stare. We may be able simply to enjoy erotic images and to see through their surface sexuality to the fundamental, creative Eros at their core. Then we will have discovered the deepest secret of sex, that it is life itself, precisely in it holiness rather than its secularism. (14)

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like to word; it suggests something quite different to me. t evokes "care"; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness

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to find what surrounds us strange and off; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion of seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.

Michael Foucault in Politics, Philosophy, Culture  tells us, "I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means; the desire is there; there is an infinity of things to know; the people capable of doing such work exist. So what is our problem? Too little: channels of communication that are too narrow, almost monopolistic, inadequate. We mustn't adopt a protectionist attitude, to stop "bad" information from invading and stifling the "good." We must rather increase the possibility for movement backwards and forwards. This would not lead, as people often fear, to uniformity an leveling down, but, on the contrary, to the simultaneous existence and differentiation of these various networks." (15)
When a man or woman gazes at the body of another, whether in sex, in the movies, in a magazine, or in the privacy of a daydream, it isn't readily apparent what is going on. For many this gaze is so alluring that it seems to answer a strong need, not just a passing fancy, and sometimes it can be overwhelmingly compulsive. For others it is a scandal. But then, compulsion and scandal are often closely connected. Both reactions indicate that the sexual gaze has strong emotional powered is mysteriously and fundamentally meaningful.

The individual makes himself, obtains the right to an autonomous existence and a personal identity, only through relations with others. From that comes the apparent paradox of the individual as a social invention. In practice, life comes down to a permanent negotiation in which all social interactions is both stimulating and creative of a personal identity, and at the same time a penetration o f the self, an invasion and a constant threat to that same identity. This fundamental game that is all social relationships in therefore inevitable, essential, and dangerous, and modesty remains its witness. (16)

In her book on photography Susan Sontag  quotes Diane Arbus who says "If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, 'I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life.' I mean people are going to say, 'You're crazy.' Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid." (17)

Women artists should also avoid encouraging a voyeuristic gaze in self-representations that use the female body as a symbol of subjectivity. For, as Ins Young notes:

Voyeuristic looking takes a distance from the object of its gaze, from which it is absent and elsewhere. From this distance the object of the gaze cannot return or reciprocate the gaze; the voyeur's look is judgmental, holding power over the guilty object of the gaze by offering punishment or forgiveness.

In her book Carnal Knowing, Margaret Miles tells us, "Like men, women will need the commitment and self-discipline requisite to learning a new response -- in the face of an inadequate response that has become habitual -- if we are to look at a representation of a naked woman not with an appraising patriarchal eye, but with an eye that identifies with the person represented. This identification is a necessary preliminary step toward noticing and understanding the visual clues that make that person's interior life accessible." (18)

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"It has quite justly been said of Atget that he photographed [deserted Paris streets] like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance."
--Walter Benjamin (19)

Surveys of many cultures lead us to conclude that the truly natural state of the adult human is dressed, or decorated, but that his sense of nature demands from him a deep respect for nakedness. This respect may lead him to invent ideas not only of the "wickedness" of nakedness, to which generations of Protestants became so accustomed, but also of the "naturalness" of nakedness, which is all the more powerful for being a fiction. Nakedness is not a customary but rather an assumed state, common to all but natural to none, except on significantly marked occasions. These may be ritual, theatrical, or domestic, but they are always special, no matter how frequent.

In her book Seeing Through Clothes, Anne Hollander states that, "Occasions for nakedness often have to do with sex, and so among those for whom sex was associated with shame, a sense of the shamefulness of nudity could arise. The Christian West, however, though thoroughly committed to this ancient Hebraic idea, also had its origins in other Mediterranean cultures devoted to the celebration of human physical beauty. From both these traditions Western civilization synthesized a sense of the essentially virtuous beauty of human nakedness, apart from its simple physical pleasantness -- an idea of its spiritual beauty derived from its common naturalness and its corruptibility, not its physical charm. For Christians the corruptibility of the body, dressed or undressed, lies in its fragile susceptibility to decay and sin, but the special corruptibility of nakedness among naturally clothed humans lies in its readiness to seem not only erotic but weak, ugly, or ridiculous. If nudity were going to represent anything good besides crude sexual desirability among the much-dressed Western Christian nations, art was going to be required to make it beautiful, strong, and apparently natural. Moreover, this transformation had to be accomplished in ways that expressed the beautiful truth of nudity and also allowed for the requisite sense of its shameful sexuality. Above all, Western representational art had to invent a nudity that allowed for the sense of clothes  their symbolic importance, their special organic life, carried out in fashionable change, and their influence." (20)

Abigail Solomon-Godeau in Photography at the Dock tells us, "that erotic and pornographic photographs were produced almost from the medium's inception should come as no surprise. That it does so is a testimonial only to the near-total elision of this fact from the standard histories in the field. Once one knows of the early existence of such production, however, hints and traces of its flourishing existence can be deduced in various ways." (21)

Allan Trachtenberg in his "Classic Essays On Photography" quotes Baudelaire who says, "It was not long before thousands of pairs of greedy eyes were glued to the peepholes of the stereoscope, as though they were the skylights of the infinite. The love of obscenity, which is as vigorous a growth in the heart of natural man as self-love, could not let slip such a glorious satisfaction." (22)

Linda Williams in her introduction to What She Wants tells us, "What do I see? I see pornography and eroticism, I see intimacy and distance, I see penises and phalluses. What do I want? Most of all, I want the chance to keep exercising my greedy eyes, the chance to keep looking." (23)

What about the pleasures of imagemaking and looking? Scopophilia -- that is, the sexually motivated pleasure taken in looking -- is not the sole preserve of men: women photographers can and have affirmed their sexual pleasure in taking sexualized images of men's bodies. Neither is sado-masochistic violence and there are many ways in which images may be constructed and enjoyed by women viewers that are both subtle and explicit suggestions of the powerful sexual fantasies which many women experience." (24)

Jonn Paul Sarte in Being and Nothingness states, "Here I am, bent over the keyhole; suddenly I hear a footstep. I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me. Somebody has seen me." (25)

Victor Burgin in his essay entitled "Newton's Gravity" which appears in an anthology entitled The Critical Image edited by Carol Squires tells us that by entering the model's space he has, in a sense, taken her place -- identified himself with her, June, his wife, has taken his place. Newton reveals himself to her, and to us, as a voyeur the raincoat is his joke at his own expense. A voyeur in a raincoat? The photographer is here both a voyeur and an exhibitionist: a flasher, making an exposure. The raincoat opens at the front to form a shadowy delta, from which has sprung this tensely erect and gleamingly naked woman, this coquette. The photographer has flashed his prick, and it turns out to be a woman. Who else wears a raincoat? A detective -- like the one who, in all those old B-movies, investigates all those old dangerously mysterious young women. Following her, watching her until, inevitably, the femme prove fatale. Where am I in all this? In the same place as Newton -- caught looking. (26)

Freud in his "Three Essays on the theory of Sexuality" states, "Every active perversion is . . . accompanied by its passive counterpart: anyone who is an exhibitionist in his unconscious is at the same time a voyeur." (27)

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7. Mellon, Nude Theory
8. Ayalah, D. and Weinstock, I. Breasts
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12. Synder, D. Nude Theory
13. Ewing, W. The Body
14. The Soul of Sex
15. Foucault, M. Politics Philosophy, Culture
16. The Soul of Sex
17. Sontag, S. On Photography. Farrar, Straus, 1977.
18. Miles, M.R. Carnal Knowing. Vintage, 1989.
19. On Photography.
20. Hollander, A. Seeing Through Clothes. UC Press, 1978.
21. Solomon-Godeau, A. Photography at the Dock. U of Minnesota Press, 1991.
22. Charles Baudelaire, "The Modern Public and Photography," in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg . Leete's Island Books, 1980
23. Williams, L. in introduction to What She Wants, ed. Salaman, N. Verso,1994.
24.What She Wants
25. Sarte. Being and Nothingness. Washington Square Press, 1993.
26. Burgin, V. Newton's Gravity in Squires, The Critical Image, 1990.
27. Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Basic Books, 1988.