Lecture Notes: Nude & Naked

How does the art world think of nude and naked?

In the language of art, “good naked” is conveyed by the
word “nude”, while if you say “naked”, you mean “bad
naked”. The nude is posed, perfect, idealised; the naked
is just someone with no clothes on.
– Jonathan Jones

We firstly began by looking at the ‘Nudes’ series by Thomas Ruff, and whats happened in the loss of quality from these porn stills. They very much become painterly and some looked like sketches, intimacy and fantasy was ethereal, no tthe hyper real of porn.

We then looked at the history of art and the role of the nude in photography history. We looked at the work from Venus of Willendorf as an early fertility statue through the male dominated ancient Greeks and on to our go to image of nude from the 24th-16th century. In particular we looked at the work of Bill Brandt, Brassai, Man Ray.

Bill Brandt

   Brassai

Man Ray

We then began to look at The male nude, we often see nude females across the media and hardly ever nude males. In recent years this has changed as we are seeing more males being photographed nude. John Coplans work is based on photographing males in the nude. His work is not to attract an audience in a sexual way but to look and the body in term of its age and difference.

‘I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to
Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and
spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples
among my sister photographers. The act of looking
appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always
been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man,
these acts are commonplace, even expected.’
– Sally Mann