y Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931), a German aristocrat who had settled in Taormina on the island of Sicily before the turn of the century. His photographs, along with those of his compatriot Wilhelm, aka. Guglielmo, Plüschow (1852–1930), were also issued as postcard collections, and are known to have been widely distributed across Europe and beyond, as were photographs of similar subjects by the Italians Vincenzo Galdi and Gaetano d’Agata. At the same time some photographic studios would strip away Italianate languidness to develop the culture of the naked (male) ‘pose’ also known as the ‘pose plastique’, depicting naked young men entangled in a group which often resembled a fragment of a sarcophagus or temple frieze from ancient Greece. Much later, an Englishman called Laurence Woodford, who garnered the title of ‘The Prince of Pose’, would in 1938 publish his <strong>book</strong> Physical Idealism and the Art of Pose. His models – wearing the minimal ‘posing pouch’ such as used by some of <strong>Vaughan</strong>’s photographic subjects – would also appear in well-established and ‘respectable’ body-building or naturist magazines such as Health and Strength and Health and Fitness. Besides his own photography of his friends at his studio and at Pagham, <strong>Vaughan</strong> is known to have had collections of similar photos by others, and of magazines such as the above. In Germany <strong>Vaughan</strong> might have come across the movements or publications of Adolf Koch or Major Hans Surén. Surén had been the German Army’s Director of Physical Education for four years before his dismissal in 1924, whereupon he published his illustrated <strong>book</strong> Der Mensch und die Sonne followed a year later by his manual for disciplined exercises Deutsche Gymnastik to promote ‘virile, primitive manhood’. Koch, on the other hand, coming from a Socialist perspective, advocated naked gymnastics in the open air, with the educational purpose of alleviating the effects of urban poverty that damaged the health of children and young people. Koch would eventually organize a widely attended international Congress on Nudity and Education in 1929, but his work would be banned when the Hitler regime came to power. Whether this was because of his known Socialist politics, or because he promoted naked school exercises, is unclear. Illustration from Hans Suren’s Deutsche Gymnastik This encouragement of increased physical activity in the open air was matched by a new fashion for swimming and sunbathing naked. This had already started, for example, at Stockholm’s swimming baths before World War I. Shortly after the war, Coco Chanel, a leading figure of fashion, hymned the beauty of bronzed bodies and encouraged sunbathing at fashionable resorts in the south of France. France saw the launch in 1926 of Marcel Kienné de Mongeot’s fortnightly naturist magazine Vivre intégralement from within the League for Physical and Mental Regeneration. In the same year, the American naturist Bernarr Macfadden launched the shortlived Muscle Builder, followed by his more successful magazine Physical Culture in 1929. Cooper points out that a difference would soon become evident between ‘naturists’ with their more philosophical and contemplative enjoyment of being naked in a natural setting in the spirit of de Mongeot, and ‘nudists’ who admired the sensuality of the naked body for its own sake and delighted in seeing it or being themselves seen naked in the spirit of Macfadden. Publishing of these magazines and their photographs, however, still risked prosecution. 4 In the 1920s the genre of a photographic essay or ‘oeuvre’ – in place of the ‘livre d’artiste’, a ‘livre de photographie’ so to speak – broke new ground with the publication of the likes of Germaine Krull’s Métal (1928, exploring the engineering structures of the Eiffel Tower and other impressive metal structures), Man Ray’s Electricité (1931, showcasing his own invention, the ‘rayogramme’) and Brassaï’s Paris de nuit (1933, revealing an unglamorous and ignored side of Parisian life). Such publications may have inspired <strong>Vaughan</strong> to assemble his own photographic ‘livres’ – the Male model posing with hessian sheet [PL9] photographic print on Agfa Brovira paper laid on card 30.2 x 20.2 cm (photograph), 30.2 x 25.2 cm (card) 32
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