The Body Exposed: Views of the Body

Michael Kohler

Views of the Body is the catalogue to the exhibition Das Aktfoto. Like the exhibition, the book seeks to survey 150 years of the nude in photography with contemporary unbiased eyes. A historical study of this sort quickly reveals two things. The first is that photographs of nudes have always been more, and often something quite different, than simply "beautiful pictures of beautiful women". Secondly, the conventional distinction between tasteful nudes and tasteless pictures of naked bodies has outlived its usefulness, since this allegedly aesthetic evaluation merely conceals the moral standards of the last century with their long since outdated notions of "propriety and decency". Having unlaced the supporting corset of bourgeois moral sensibility, its immediately clear just how little is actually known about the depiction of the nude body in photography - its history, its different...

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