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Thursday, March 11, 2021

Heid Goes Horizontal


Hermann Heid was a 19th C. Austrian photographer who worked for a time in Paris and had 
a number of his male and female nude photographic studies published in a bound album along 
with works by Igout.  A problem of sorts has arisen over which photographer produced which 
photos because not only did the publisher not differentiate or credit either of the two, but they 
used some of the same models, studio settings, and style.  Oh, well.  Today we look at some 
works supposedly by Heid in which he shows his penchant for photographing models in 
various horizontal or near  horizontal positions.  We start with this duo featuring a 
personal favorite burly model with curly hair.

 

9 comments:

  1. Contrary to popular belief today, the Victorians were not in fact prudes about nudity or the human body at all... their attitude was only where and when it was acceptable. This was largely owing to the Classical Revival of the period in education and also the arts, and the fact that Platonic thought informed male friendships at a time when everyone was presumed to be heterosexual. That it was a very disingenuous misreading of Plato is just an historical fact. Photography was initially a completely unregulated art and Heid's publication is the perfect example of this. Regulation and even criminality were introduced later on the spurious grounds that nudity was "offensive" and corrupting, when it was in fact not viewed that way by wider society. Society was in fact suborned by a small number of vocal, self-appointed moralists and bullies who got their jollies by pushing other people around and having society in their thrall. As an historical precedent, the comparison with what is happening today with attempts to regulate and censor the internet should give us all pause for thought. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

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    1. That's all interesting. I have to wonder if it relates to the publisher having failed to credit the photographers of that volume. Maybe he was just sloppy and felt no societal pressures. Otherwise, why publish it at all? Hopefully they at least got paid.

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  2. It would be interesting and perhaps telling to know the date of publication. There was an enormous amount of governmental anticlericalism in the French Third Republic in the 1880s and '90s, leading to France becoming a secular state in 1905 - the Dreyfus Affair and the Roman Catholic history of antisemitism played an enormous part in this. The relevance of this here is that a lot of "moral" Church concerns were simply ignored. After secularization, the governments of the Third Republic were then under an obligation to note Church protests and sometimes even to act on them. This marriage of convenience gradually allowed the Roman Catholic hierarchy to influence government policy through backstairs lobbying. Laws deemed as "not conducive to the public good" started to appear on the Statute Book. (Abortion is a good example. Roman Catholic law until 1917 allowed for abortion "if the life of the mother were endangered". After 1917, abortion was completely banned. The sale of contraceptives was likewise heavily curtailed after Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae, outlawing the pill. The sale of condoms was only liberalized under a French socialist government as a result of the AIDS crisis.) Slowly but surely - with homophobia largely driving the opposition - male nude photography was curtailed, but semi-nude was still permitted owing to the particular cultural distinction the French make between the "pornographic" and the "erotic". It could be that the photographers were not named in order to avoid prosecution or at least police interest. It is difficult to say without a publication date. The overview is that throughout Europe, a cultural conservatism took root and which was not to be challenged by societal pressure until the 1960s.

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    1. That should be: "Laws against moral issues deemed by the Church as "not conducive to the public good" started to appear on the Statute Book.

      I am listening to the news and as I am a man, I cannot multitask.

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    2. Several reputable sources date both Heid and Igout's work of this type to around 1880, something I should have stated in the caption. The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the publication of the album to 1884.

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    3. That, and the succeeding decade, were the freest time for both homoerotic photography as they were for homosexuals until the years of liberation which in France, came in the early 1980s. Homosexuality was not a crime under the Napoleonic Code, but morality was strictly controlled. With the inception of the Fifth Republic in 1959, Yvonne, General De Gaulle's wife - who had been elected to nothing by nobody - took it upon herself to close down all the art nouveau Paris urinoirs, which only encouraged the Parisian habit of pissing in people's doorways. When Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1895, it is thought some 600 gay men in London made a hasty retreat, taking the boat train from Victoria station to Calais for the comparative freedom there. There seems no reason for Heid and Igout to have "hidden" at this time, so the reason for their non-attributed works is probably lost in the mists of time.

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    4. It's also worth noting that both Heid and Igout photographed lots of nude women as well as men, the ostensible purpose being for poor artists to save money on live model fees. Somehow, I doubt that either of them failed to realize the erotic implications of their work.

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  3. I find the comments by Calorman really interesting and want to thank him for making them every now and then to illuminate a photo or drawing

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    1. I agree, and find his contributions to be quite valuable.

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