In our brave new world of technological advances, digitally enhanced media and
information super-highways, there is one nineteenth-century medium that will not be
going away - photography. Society's love affair with the single image is ongoing.
And the subject matter that caused the most interest and controversy at the dawn of the camera age still fascinates today, and that is the nude.
The female nude remains one of the classic areas of photographic study and work. After almost 1 50 years of the photographer's art, the idea that a nude image could create the same kind of stir as those early daguerreotypes from the racier Paris salons, featuring ladies with skirts akimbo and louchely draped paramours, is pretty preposterous. We have moved on. A lot. 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. In fact, one could argue that we have come to the point where we are suffering from over-exposure to the naked and near-naked form. Everywhere you look flesh is being pressed into the service of advertising, fashion, music - any art form, really - to catch our eye and draw us in.