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Review: NSFW: Capturing the Body ‘Naked Before the Camera’ at the Metropolitan Museum

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
30NAKED2_SPAN-articleLarge.jpg


A nude from the early 1930s by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who, along with Edward Weston,
truncates the female body so radically that it resembles a kindof phallus or an undulant landscape.

A NYTimes Report


Likely as not, you are going to be somewhere far away and miss the very special retrospective look at the history of photographing the human body now showing in ‘Naked Before the Camera", at the Metropolitan MuseumThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10028-0198, Phone: 212-535-7710
 
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Jerome Marot

Well-known member
A nude from the early 1930s by the Hungarian photographer Brassaï, who, along with Edward Weston,
truncates the female body so radically that it resembles a kindof phallus or an undulant landscape.

A NYTimes Report

If the people from the New York time think that this picture resembles a phallus, puritanism has really gotten out of hand in America.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
If the people from the New York time think that this picture resembles a phallus, puritanism has really gotten out of hand in America.

Jerome,

I thought it was a bit of a stretch too, but maybe there's a previous review of such work with a more fitting example. Yes Americans are nuts about sex!!

They had a show there years back with nude photos of women and a woman stripped for a photographer and was arrested for public indecency!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
The Exhibit Rationale

Naked before the Camera
March 27–September 9, 2012

Gallery 852, Met NY, NY.

"Since the beginning of art and in every medium, depicting the human body has been among the artist's greatest challenges and supreme achievements, as can so easily be seen by Museum visitors walking through the galleries of Greek and Roman statuary, African and Oceanic art, Old Master paintings, or Indian sculpture. Tapping veins of mythology, carnal desire, hero worship, and aesthetic pleasure, depictions of the nude have also triggered impassioned discussions of sin and sexuality, cultural identity, and canons of beauty. Controversies are often aroused even more intensely when the artist's chosen medium is photography, with its accuracy and specificity—when a real person stood naked before the camera—rather than traditional media where more generalized and idealized forms prevail.

In the medium's early days—particularly in France, where Victorian notions of propriety held less sway than in England and America, and where life drawing was a central part of artistic training—photographs proved to be a cheap and easy substitute for the live model. While serving painters and sculptors, many nineteenth-century photographic nudes were also intended as works of art in their own right. Still others bore the title "artist's study" merely to evade government censors and legitimize images that were, in fact, more likely intended to stir a gentleman's loins than to enhance his aesthetic endeavors. Outside the realms of art and erotica, photographic nudes were made to aid the study of anatomy, movement, forensics, and ethnography.

In twentieth-century art, the body became a vehicle for surreal and modernist manipulation and for intimate odes to beauty or poems to a muse. Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, nudity and its representation took on new meanings—as declarations of freedom from societal strictures, as assertions of individual identity, as explorations of sexuality and gender roles, and as responses to AIDS.

Naked before the Camera surveys the history of this subject and examines some of the motivations and meanings that underlie its expression." Met N.Y., N.Y. 2012
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Here's another nude by the the same hungarian photographer.

naked_poster.ashx


André Kertész: Distortion #6
Gelatin silver print, 1932

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection,
Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.321)
© The Estate of André Kertész / Higher Pictures


I'm not sure whether he used a just the distortion of a close focussing distance with a lesser quality lens, or else perhaps, a curved mirror or both, but the distortion it shows, abstracts of the subject. It's evidence of "what my camera can make", not reality.

Asher
 
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Mark Hampton

New member
Here's another nude by the the same hungarian photographer.

naked_poster.ashx


André Kertész: Distortion #6
Gelatin silver print, 1932

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Ford Motor Company Collection,
Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987 (1987.1100.321)
© The Estate of André Kertész / Higher Pictures


I'm not sure whether he used a just the distortion of a close focussing distance with a lesser quality lens, or else perhaps, a curved mirror or both, but the distortion it shows, abstracts of the subject. It's evidence of "what my camera can make", not reality.

Asher

Asher,

beautiful work.. keep them coming.. i would love to look through that work...

not sure what you mean by " It's evidence of "what my camera can make", not reality."

cheers
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Asher,

beautiful work.. keep them coming.. i would love to look through that work...

This way, we can have a virtual set of "Guest Photographers" from which to draw inspiration on the photography of the nude and pictures in general.

..not sure what you mean by " It's evidence of "what my camera can make", not reality."

cheers

Garry Winogrand is reported as saying

"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed."

I wonder whether the Hungarian Photographer here thought like that, saying, "Let's see how she'll look taken at this close distance with the curved mirror from a circus side show?" Or did he think, I want to express the idea of the importance of the heavenly things but remove the usual significance of the rest of her."

Here, for sure, he did not just happen to get this result, as Winogrand might assert. One thing to be remembered is that Winogrand put himself in a specific place to take his picture. So most of of what he shows is not as accidental as he might imply.

Asher
 

Mark Hampton

New member
This way, we can have a virtual set of "Guest Photographers" from which to draw inspiration on the photography of the nude and pictures in general.



Garry Winogrand is reported as saying

"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed."

I wonder whether the Hungarian Photographer here thought like that, saying, "Let's see how she'll look taken at this close distance with the curved mirror from a circus side show?" Or did he think, I want to express the idea of the importance of the heavenly things but remove the usual significance of the rest of her."

Here, for sure, he did not just happen to get this result, as Winogrand might assert. One thing to be remembered is that Winogrand put himself in a specific place to take his picture. So most of of what he shows is not as accidental as he might imply.

Asher


Asher,

he is of course correct -

"Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed."

although - it its not a thing once its an image other that the collection sparks in our mind - a photograph is data - when read it becomes information and that is the thing ness!

going to lochness the morrow - will bring back some images of nessy - naked !
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Let me add a note on Andre Kertesz

André Kertész (2 July 1894 – 28 September 1985), born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.Wikipedia




610_kertesz_about.jpg


From 1914, Andre Kertesz' war photographs in the Austrian army, "concerned themselves with the lives of soldiers away from the fighting. Part of Kertesz’s genius was his ability to cast attention on images seemingly “unimportant.” These subtle images of the moments of joy and contemplation away from the front were a revolutionary use of the newly invented hand-held camera."

" in 1925 he made the fateful decision to move to Paris. Excited about an opportunity to participate in the bohemian artist’s life, he worked as a freelance photographer. Working for dozens of different European magazines, Kertesz found Paris a welcoming and artistically inspiring place. Within a short time he met and made portraits of some of the great artists living in Paris, including Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, Constantin Brancusi, Sergei Eisenstein, and Tristan Tzara."[PBS.net see end of page]

"In Paris he worked for France's first illustrated magazine called VU. Involved with many young immigrant artists and the Dada movement, he achieved critical and commercial success.
Due to German persecution of the Jews and the threat of World War II, Kertész decided to emigrate to the United States in 1936, where he had to rebuild his reputation through commissioned work. In the 1940s and 1950s, he stopped working for magazines and began to achieve greater international success. His career is generally divided into four periods, based on where he was working and his work was most prominently known. They are called the Hungarian period, the French period, the American period and, toward the end of his life, the International period." Wikipedia


"By 1927 Kertesz’s scenes of the streets of Paris were beginning to attract a great deal of attention, and he had his first show at an avant-garde gallery. His humor and subtle humanity seemed to personify even the stone walls of Paris. Throughout the 1930s he remained in Paris studying the people and their inhabitation of the streets, and the play of light and shadow that so dramatically filled the urban landscape. In 1936, after the death of his mother and his marriage to Elizabeth Saly, he moved to New York, where he had been engaged by the Keyston Agency. Though he canceled the contract only a year later, the progress of the war made his return to Paris impossible. Unable to leave and treated like an enemy by the government (which prevented him from publishing for several years), Kertesz was caught in tragic uncompromising circumstances. When the war ended Kertesz had lost the momentum of a supportive artistic community, but continued to live in the States due to health and familial considerations.

For nearly twenty years his gifts remained relatively unrecognized in New York. It was not until 1964, when John Sarkowski, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, organized a one man show that Kertesz’s career was reawakened. " Read this entire story here.
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Hmm, Jerome, you're so smart, I never thought of such a simple solution! But then, I wonder how he really didi it?

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Well, Jerome, it was curved mirrors after all!

"In 1933 Kertész was commissioned for the series, Distortion, about 200 photographs of Najinskaya Verackhatz and Nadia Kasine, two models portrayed nude and in various poses, with their reflections caught in a combination of distortion mirrors, similar to a carnival's house of mirrors. In some photographs, only certain limbs or features were visible in the reflection. Some images also appeared in the 2 March issue of the "girly magazine" Le Sourire and in the 15 September 1933 issue of Arts et métiers graphiques.[1][4] Later that year, Kertész published the book Distortions, a collection of the work.[8] "Wikipedia

However, I'd love to put a note in one of the cracks in his headstone to let him know your idea which is very much cheaper to achieve the same thing, LOL!

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
I find that photographing the nude provides the artist with the richest returns for other work as nothing matches the cooperative dance between the models wish to shape herself attractively and the artists thirst for awesome forms to capture.

To me, photographing the nude is fuel for my creativity with steel. The poses provide hard to match examples of beauty we want to emulate.

Otherwise our world vision is mostly rectilinear. Just look around!

Thank goodness at least in a kitchen we have bowls, spoons, forks and dishes that have curves!

Asher
 
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