Erotic photography
Parent categories: erotica - photography
Related: cheesecake - erotic art - erotic books - erotic illustration - fashion photography - glamour photography - fetish photography - pin up
People: Alva Bernadine - Gilles Berquet - Guy Bourdin - Steve Diet Goedde - Nan Goldin - David Hamilton - Irina Ionesco - Richard Kern - Doris Kloster - Eric Kroll - David LaChapelle - Sally Mann - Robert Mapplethorpe - Steven Meisel - Carlo Mollino - Helmut Newton - Bettina Rheims - Paolo Roversi - Thomas Ruff - Jan Saudek - Jeanloup Sieff - Romain Slocombe - Roy Stuart - Jock Sturges - Ellen Von Unwerth - Trevor Watson - Theodore Zichy
Carlo Mollino: Polaroids - by Fulvio Ferrari, Napoleone Ferrari [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Roy Stuart, Vol. 1 - Roy Stuart [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Hot Cheeks (2004) Martin Sigrist [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Definition
Erotic photographs appeared shortly after the creation of the photography technology that made them possible. Erotic photographs have much in common with other forms of erotica.Erotic photography usually refers to nudity in photographs.
Nudity is a common subject both in fine arts and popular culture.
Glamour photography (Playboy, Penthouse, Lui) is a well known form of erotic photography.
Early beginnings of nude photography
Nude pictures prior to 1835 generally consisted of paintings and drawings. That year, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre invented the first practical process of photography [2]. Unlike earlier photographs, his daguerreotypes had stunning quality and did not fade with time. The new technology did not go unnoticed by artists eager for new ways to depict the undraped feminine form. In Nude photography, 1840-1920, Peter Marshall notes: "In the prevailing moral climate at the time of the invention of photography, the only officially sanctioned photography of the body was for the production of artist's studies. Many of the surviving examples of Daguerreotypes are clearly not in this genre but have a sensuality that clearly implies they were designed as erotic or pornographic images"[3].
The daguerreotypes were not without drawbacks, however. The main difficulty was that they could only be reproduced by photographing the original picture. In addition, the earliest daguerreotypes had exposure times ranging from three to fifteen minutes, making them somewhat impractical for portraiture. Since one picture could cost a week's salary, the audience for nudes mostly consisted of artists and the upper echelon of society [4]. Nude stereoscopy began in 1838 and became extremely popular. In 1841, William Henry Talbot patented the Calotype process, the first negative-positive process, making possible multiple copies [5]. The technology was immediately employed to reproduce nude portraits. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_of_female_nudes_in_the_public_domain#Early_beginnings [Jan 2006]
See also: photography - 1830s - erotic photography
Natural Beauties (2004) - Eolake Stobblehouse
Natural Beauties (2004) - Eolake Stobblehouse [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
A compilation of color nude photos from 20 erotic photographers, introducing a new style of Nude Art: Simple Nudes, focusing exclusively on a model's beauty. The Simple Nudes philosophy is to ""simply"" celebrate the model's beauty, and not subsume the model to any other purpose, not sex, not Art, not commercialism. Like the Dogma film movement from Europe, Simple Nudes are characterized by * the inherent beauty of the model in the natural state * no forced poses * no unnatural styling or props This new, independent form of expression, also named DOMAI style, from the web site which invented and champions it, is not a compromise between Art nudes and sex nudes, but is a true third art of nude appreciation. --Amazon.com
see also: domai.com Google gallery (Domai.com is the site of Eolake Stobblehouse, the editor of the book)
see also: beauty - nude - women - erotica
The Valley (2004) - Larry Sultan
The Valley (2004) - Larry Sultan [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Since 1988, Larry Sultan has returned time and again to photograph on porn sets in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley--the Silicon(e) Valley of the porn industry. But The Valley is by no means a documentary on porn filmmaking. Rather, it is a dense series of pictures of middle-class homes invaded by the porn industry.
Sultan's lens focuses on pedestrian details--a piece of half-eaten pie, dirty linens in a heap, "actors" taking a break--that offer clues to a bizarre other-world. The lush and intricate images adroitly play with artifice and reality, adding up to rich, elliptical narratives that circle around the concepts of "home" and "desire." These images of homes and gardens, porn actors and film crews, studio and location shootings are an ambiguous meditation on suburbia and its trappings, family and transgression, loss and desire, the utopias and dystopias of middle-class lifestyle.
The Valley and its many-layered photographs outline the complexity of domestic life at the beginning of the 21st century, opening up new perspectives for photography through its innovative combination of staged and documentary photographs.
In 1998, an English magazine asked me to go on a porn set. I flew down to Burbank Airport with my wife, and we went to the house they'd given me the address of. It was a dentist's house on Van Alden. That name had all kinds of connotations when I was in high school. Because the Valley is so haunted for me by the ghosts of childhood, all of these street names have Proustian connotations. All I have to do is to say: Havenhurst, Van Alden, Vineta, Dubois, and a flood of associations comes back to me. [...] After the first five minutes of the strangeness of it all, I started to look around, going to the bedrooms, wandering through the house. It felt like a permission to go into a house in L.A. and to imagine how someone would live their life in this house. I made the pictures for the magazine. I left and thought, "This is it, this is what I have to do." --Larry Sultan via Amazon.com
see also: photography - erotic photography
X Pose (2005) - Peter Jirmann Jr
X Pose (2005) - Peter Jirmann Jr [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Acclaimed photographer Peter Jirmann’s focus is the female nude but his pictures reveal as much about emotion and personality as they do the contours and surfaces of the human body. His images capture his subjects’ ironical outlook on the world. Jirmann meticulously plans each shot before he actually takes the picture-the camera angle, the pose, the setting-so that nothing is left to chance. His are intensely erotic images of devastatingly beautiful women, each masterfully composed in a way that tells a story and becomes the basis for dreams. --via Amazon.com
From the Publisher
Intensely erotic images of women by acclaimed photographer Peter Jirmann. This collection reveals as much about emotion and personality as it does the contours and surfaces of the human body. --via Amazon.com
see also: photography - erotic photography
My Erotic X-Files (2005) - Jean-Paul Four
My Erotic X-Files (2005) - Jean-Paul Four [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
1000 Forbidden Pictures () - Mark Rotenberg
1000 Forbidden Pictures () - Mark Rotenberg [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Rotenberg Collection is an archive of desire and almost palpable everyday yearning, the fruit of a hundred years of sexual documentation. It is also an alternative social history of the century, one dictated by the body rather than politics. After stumbling across some old pin-up pics in late 70s Brooklyn, Mark Lee Rotenberg started to build the collection that now numbers more than 85,000 erotic photos. Whether faded sepia prints, hand-coloured postcards, 3-D images, magazine cuttings or stills, every item bears witness to the poignant and diverse ways in which displaced gratification is sought.
There is no greater resource than human flesh, but the innocence and simple charm of these pictures, any shock they might have provoked softened by time, lie in the willingness of all involved to free up the possibilities of arousal through the mediums of representation. We see therefore the usual paraphernalia of the fetishistic, the stockings, leather, lace and tools, but the whip's lash is blunted: The women, we might see walking down an everyday street, the fantasies are shared and consensual, the world is given an extra frisson of being, a heightened and stimulating touch of the exotic and risque. This is a collection then for anyone who dreams, anyone who knows the secret electricity of longing.
See also: forbidden
Sexcats (2004) - Christopher Mealie
Sexcats (2004) - Christopher Mealie [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Tawdry, yet titillating pictures from a sinful past -- rare, vintage pinup and girly photos from the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of girly photos. In this collection of 350 curvaceous kittens are dames, dancers, doxies, broads, floozies and would-be starlets from the 50's. These Sex Cats were typified by Jayne Mansfield, Diana Dors and Mamie VanDoren and appeared in films like Baby Doll and Peeping Tom and magazines like Striparama, After Hours, Blast!, Spree, Taboo and Tom Kat. The awkward stare, ill-fitting lingerie and occasional bruise all provide testimony to the candid yet concupiscent nature of these seedy, yet provocative, pictures. These seductive images were fetish objects for the millions, and were discovered glued into albums or record sleeves, tied in stacks, in old cigar boxes, and hidden in books (notably: Dante's Inferno). --via Amazon.com
see also: erotic photography
Legs (2004) - Dave Naz, Nina Hartley
Legs (2004) - Dave Naz (Photographer), Nina Hartley (Photographer) [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Product Description:
Flexible toes, high arches, full thighs and the seamless sheer pantyhose that adorn them; the girls in Dave Naz's world have legs that just won't quit. Unlike other compilations devoted to praising a particular body part, this collection showcases the entire woman, inviting us to see the whole person and not just the fetish object. Each model displays her own personality, her pleasure in being seen, the eternal dance between exhibitionist and voyeur, and Dave has done all the footwork. --via Amazon.com
Soft (2004) - Richard Kern
Soft (2004) - Richard Kern [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Amazon.com
Richard Kern is smarter than the average pornographer. What other shutterbug for Penthouse and Juggs also makes videos for Sonic Youth and Marilyn Manson and exhibits his shots of naked friends in high-toned galleries? But these artfully artless photos mark a new breakthrough for Kern. Best known for very hard-edged pictures and films--his DVD retrospective is entitled The Hard Core Collection--he now shows us a far softer side, which turns out to be even more unsettlingly transgressive than his violent stuff. The Soft photos are like a collaboration between himself and his punky young subjects, flirtily flaunting themselves in various states of come-hither undress. It's an art that conceals art: his skill in lighting, framing and staging his scenes coyly hides behind an unretouched do-it-yourself look, making the steamy scenes resemble what might happen if the amateur goth exhibitionists of the Suicidegirls website had all gone to art school. The girls loll and puff bong smoke into the ripe O of each others' mouths, blankly display nosebleeds, "accidentally" flash their panties, mockingly parody archetypes from Cindy Sherman, soft-core porn, and notorious candid tabloid "gotcha" snaps of celebrities: Catherine Zeta-Jones pregnant and smoking, Uma Thurman caught topless emerging from the surf. They play their parts with gleeful aplomb, in a fun, smutty (but not too smutty) conversation with the photographer. Institute of Contemporary Art curator Matthew Higgs supplies Artforum-style insights in his scholarly essay, but this is one book most folks won't read for the articles. --Tim Appelo
Product Description:
Beyond traditional portraiture, Richard Kern's new works manifest a strong eroticism while incorporating the cinematic power of his earlier "Transgression" theme. His recent photographs with saturated color and stark, atmospheric lighting accentuate his pretty-but-not-perfect young nudes. Inspired, unique, and "real," his approach is as daring as ever in Soft. Still sticking with the "no airbrush" motto, Kern's unpretentious, honest photos draw the viewer in close.
Kern's longstanding relationship with the "No-wave" scene, which incorporated music, performance, feminist art, and the punk lifestyle, is reflected and distilled in these photographs. --via Amazon.com
see also: Richard Kern
Beluga (2004) - Jean Van Cleemput
Beluga (2004) - Jean Van Cleemput [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Synopsis
Using the interior of Wah-Kel, the unique Chinese restaurant that Cleemput discovered in Antwerp, he staged a montage of photographs that also appeal to areas other than the taste buds. For added impact he decided to get on board chef Wouter Keersmaekers, proud owner of a Guide Michelin star, whose stylish international culinary creations top off this rich seafood dish of photographical ingredients.
Wah-Kel (Verversrui 32) is situated in Antwerp's lively red light district, just across the famous dance club Café d'Anvers and pretty close to the hottest club in Antwerp: Red & Blue. When Wah Kel was founded back in 1923, it became the first Chinese restaurant in Belgium.
Back in the old days, Belgian people did not know much of 'exotic' food. Chinese food was something completely weird for them. E.g. chicken slices were something which Belgians had never seen before. They even thought that it was rat meat. Soy bean sprouts (basic ingredient of chop suey) were thought to be the poisonous roots of a potato. As you can imagine, the Chinese have had a hard time in convincing the Belgians that the Chinese cuisine was -- together with French cuisine -- the best in the world. --http://www.angelfire.com/biz/wahkel/ [Jan 2005]
Luba (2003) - Petter Hegre
Luba (2003) - Petter Hegre [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Petter Hegre was born in 1969 in the Norwegian city of Stavanger. He studied at the "Brooks Institute of Photography" in Santa Barbara and worked in New York as an assistant to Richard Avedon.. Hegre's creative base is his studio in Stavanger from where he travels the world, in a continuous search for new, young, talented models to photograph. His homepage is an erotic trip: www.petter-hegre.no
Unpublished (2004) - Gunter Blum
Unpublished (2004) - Klaus Honnef, Gunter Blum (Photographer) [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Established critics place the photographic works of Günter Blum on the same level as contemporary works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, or Lucien Clergue. Blum's exceptional artistic examination of the possibilities and ideas of the medium of black-and-white photography has made his work popular among collectors on the international art market and museum exhibitors. The female nude has always been Blum's main motif. Making a decisive use of composition, gestures, light, and intention, he pushes his work to the very borders of erotic provocation. Blum's artistic work and his creativity bear witness to an intensity and to a passion that are capable of arising anew with every single subject. --via Amazon.de
see also: legs