Revisiting the most potent and compelling photographs of nudity
Struggles to overcome bodily inhibitions, fleeting moments of unalloyed intimacy, the proximity of soft flesh with unforgiving concrete, and evading the penetrating omnipotence of the male gaze... a few of the many drives galvanising these studies of nudity as, below, we look back through our archive to share a selection of the most compelling portraits of bodies, unclothed and exposed.
SELF, STEPH WILSON (2022)
In the midst of lockdown, London-based photographer Steph Wilson grew weary of the self-initiated, self-isolating personal projects filling her Instagram feed with “endless swathes of forlorn, house-bound photographers gazing out of their apartment windows”. Instead, she chose to try and push the form further; to experiment with ways test and explore her own psyche while challenging the hackneyed tropes of introspection.
In an attempt to circumvent her own ego, she focused on self-objectifying her body in order to use herself as a prop in her own image-making process. “There is something incredibly focused, like a sort of meditation, when taking a self-portrait,” she told Dazed earlier this year. “You are very much in your self but, equally, out of body… you become multiple perspectives – the viewer and the subject. You watch yourself in a way you wouldn’t usually, composing yourself like a bowl of fruit.”
What emerges in Self is an interrogation of what it means to inhabit a physical body, confronting our own nakedness at its most vulnerable as well as at its most formidable. This ongoing photo project sees Wilson embrace the comedic indignities of the body [contorted in a backward roll, with a candle protruding from her rectum] as well as poised with renaissance goddess-like potency amid abundant flowering foliage.
NUDE, FOTOGRAFISKA NEW YORK (2022)
While galleries and institutions across the world are still largely dominated by artworks made by white lads (a 2018 analysis of major US museums by the NMWA found their collections to be 87 per cent male and 85 per cent white), an exhibition at Fotografiska New York earlier this year presented an alternative vision.
Gathering together work by 30 women of 20 different nationalities, Nude sought to reframe the traditional nude, presenting a diverse collection of photographic portraits of the naked body through a female gaze. Images such as Yushi Li’s “The Feast Outside” (2020) present a collection of naked men arranged around a swimming pool in a range of passive poses while the fully-clothed artist gazes proprietorially at her quarry.
“Unlike painting, photography is not a medium that has been ‘owned’ by men for centuries,” Johan Vikner, director of global exhibitions at Fotografiska, declared in a press statement. “In art, we have mostly been presented with the same kind of nude through our modern western history. A consideration most often decided and depicted by men, for an audience of men.”
In a further evasion of the male gaze, the images presented in Nude include depictions of nonbinary, male, and female subjects. Photographers such as Bettina Pittaluga and Momo Akabe celebrate trans bodies in particular, with models displaying traces of their surgical transitions.
CONCRETE & SEX, SASHA KURMAZ (2013)
Naked bodies are juxtaposed with brutalist architecture in Kyiv-born photographer’s 2013 book Concrete & Sex. In a series of striking diptychs, the vulnerable softness of the bare flesh and the geometric, unyielding quality of the buildings are all amplified by comparison.
Speaking to Dazed in 2015, the artist recalled the lineage of his early interest in architecture, which originated from walking around scouring his hometown for locations to graffiti. “While walking, I kept looking over the city. This is the magic of these brutal shapes; functionality, and a frank expression of materiality,” he said. “During these trips, I have always done pictures to remember the place and go back at night to paint – sometimes I just shoot the landscapes of the city.”
US, RONA BAR AND OFEK AVSHALOM
Us invites us to witness personal, private moments of communion between couples in their homes. Some gaze back at us while others are obviously consumed only with each other. Whether they acknowledge our presence or not, they are always a unit – a duet – while we, alone, can only observe their perfect union.
Tel Aviv-based photographers Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom began working together as friends. After a year, their creative partnership evolved into a romantic relationship, giving rise to this project documenting “the warmth and intimacy of people in love in the worlds they have created for themselves”.
“The inspiration for Us came from our desire to tell stories of love and closeness at the height of the pandemic,” Bar and Avshalom told Dazed earlier this year. “In order to show how hardships can be overcome together, we started photographing lovers who had gone into lockdown under the same roof, seizing the spontaneity of their connection.”
IN HER ROOM, MARIA CLARA MACRÌ
On her travels across Europe and the US, in 2018 Italian photographer Maria Clara Macrì began creating a series of nude portraits of women she met along the way. Shooting them in their own bedrooms, the pictures allow us an insight that feels intimate and deeply personal.
“To some extent, this project was guided by destiny,” Macri told us in an interview in 2020. “I chose my subjects based on the empathetic feelings that attracted me to them, or them to me... My interest always goes to faces that reveal a mixture of different backgrounds, to gazes that reveal deepness or strength.”
In Her Room speaks of our relationship with domestic space, privacy, and womanhood. Despite photographing women from a range of backgrounds and nationalities, Macri seeks what is universal; what transcends difference. “Throughout the project, I came to understand that my subjects were showing me what binds us – women from across the world – to one another,” she explained. “Working with them, I could see how each of those women had something that resonated with me. Somehow, they were all reflections of myself. Every time I would meet one of my subjects, I would become more aware of who I am, losing and finding myself again while entering those rooms.”
F*CK ART: THE BODY & ITS ABSENCE, THE MUSEUM OF SEX (2022)
Desire is elusive and amorphous; indomitable yet perishable; riddled with impossible contradictions. In her lyrical reflection on lust, Eros the Bittersweet, poet and essayist Anne Carson conclude, “All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox.”
F*CK ART: the body & its absence at The Museum of Sex in New York traced the unique interplay of absence and presence at work in the complex mechanism of attraction. Featuring a majority of gender variant or queer artists, the exhibition’s biennale-inspired format interrogates the perspectives of living artists on the much sex and sexuality.
Using the body as what the gallery describes as “a charged and fluid meaning-making agent”, the artwork featured intervenes in the tradition of the nude. Co-curator Eve Arballo explained, “With F*CK ART 2022, we wanted to create a space for artists to present new and evocative artwork that pushes the boundaries of how we represent and discuss sex, in all its complexity.”