Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.