Vaughan_book

II
Emmanuel Cooper has explained in his comprehensive study Fully exposed: the male nude in
photography how the choice of the (male) nude as a subject coincided with the birth of photography
itself, as soon as the model could show that s/he could hold the pose for the necessary length of
the camera’s exposure. Not only had many of the first photographers originally studied as artists,
but also they saw photographing the nude as a substitute for, and even an improvement on, the
pose of a living model in the studio. The photograph could offer more realistic, ‘truthful’ varieties
of poses that could be captured and held in permanence. The pioneers in this genre included
Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, Eugène Durieu and Guglielmo Marconi, followed by collections of
naked poses by the likes of Louis Igout and Albert Loude, amongst others. Many of their
photographs would become commercially available in single prints and postcards.
The constant and rapid improvement of cameras and printing techniques throughout the
nineteenth century – portable cameras, faster exposures, cheaper and more durable prints –
released the professional and the amateur from being tied to the studio or having the burden of
moving a cartload of bulky equipment when they worked out of doors. The publication of
Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific study Animal locomotion in 1887 – showing a succession of
split-second photographs of animals and naked human figures in movement – demonstrated how
a camera was able to capture changes in muscular configuration and reveal new truths about the
human body. This in turn stimulated a fresh look at the body’s outward form and its potential for
idealization. Muybridge’s studies were available in multi-volume form, as were other similar
studies of human motion by Étienne-Jules Marey and Thomas Eakins. Many of the Muybridge’s
most successful artist-contemporaries owned a set of his Animal locomotion, such as Rodin,
Gerôme, Bouguereau, Puvis de Chavannes, Whistler, Leighton and Sargent.
Photographing the male nude as an aide for artists had invited parallels with Classical (nude)
statuary, and this in turn led in the late nineteenth century to a cult of body-building to achieve a
perfect male physique that could mirror the statuary of old. Photographic collections of classical
poses, with male nudes occasionally seen as ‘supporting’ architectural motifs, were assembled by
Koch & Rieth, whose Der Akt appeared in 1894, and Émile Bayard, who completed his portfolio
Le Nu esthétique in 1903. Perhaps the most famous of these statuesque posing body-builders
was the Hungarian-born Briton, Eugen Sandow (1867–1925), hailed at that time as ‘the world’s
most perfect man!’ Sandow published his own Journal, exhibiting photographs of his ‘movements’
and ‘poses’, and promoting his own body-building equipment and diet. 1 His book Life is
movement, published in Britain in 1918, was sold worldwide, exploiting the vogue for wrestling
and other athletic poses which had been building over the twenty years since the revival of the
Olympic Games in 1896. Sandow also recommended that ‘every physical culturist should own a
camera … the two hobbies form an admirable combination’.
In the second half of the nineteenth century some saw photography as destined to attain the same
status as painting, though others firmly rejected this notion. After the cataclysm of WWI which
affected so many levels of human behaviour, creativity and understanding – and which we might
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