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Thursday, September 30, 2021

Early 20th Century


Early 20th C. nudes is our theme for today, and we'll 
start with a rather matter of fact looking young man.

 

11 comments:

  1. He looks pretty hairless, doesn't he? But he shows up very clearly against that dark background.

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    1. Yes, and in this case that's probably just how he was, as opposed to an effect of the flash.

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  2. I really like his matter of fact or nonchalant nature. He seems totally at ease with himself and with being naked. I'd say this is probably very early 20th Century.

    Peter

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    1. Yes, he could easily be waiting for a bus on a busy street.

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    2. I think his nonchalance reflects the Zeitgeist of the day, which was most definitely that male nudity in male social spaces was really no big deal. As with the internet in our day, photography was originally completely unregulated, and as the viewer of such photography was expected to be male, nude photography was no big deal, either. It is now an historical misconception that the Victorians were prudes. Far from it. Their humour was scandalously vulgar and earthy, often suggestive and risqué, and they did not, as we do - or perhaps now did - associate the naked body with sex. There is a colossal archive of Victorian male nude photography extant.

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    3. @ Calorman: Males were indeed photographed nude almost from the dawn of photography, and I agree that the Victorian reputation for prudishness is often overstated. I have to note that 98% of the male nude photos I have from that period are Continental, as in French, Italian, and/or German. Why were the British and Americans trailing so far behind?

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  3. I'm not so sure that that is in fact the case for Britain. The YMCA would not permit swimming trunks in its baths and a naked workout was not uncommon in its gymnasia - something followed in America - and many photographs exist. The British are - or were - great innovators and inventors, but in general, they are - or most certainly were - not so greatly at ease with technology. The rollout of electricity was slow, as was the adoption of the telephone and the automobile. (The exception to the rule was television, and that was because of Queen Elizabeth's coronation - the monarchy, then, just about the most archaic institution on the face of the planet.) I think it was an unholy mélange of Puritanism - even in my boyhood, extreme Protestants shunned cinema, radio and television - climatic (at least in Britain) when it was an effort even to wash in Winter, and intellectual snobbery - the Anglosphere was quite happy with a painted male nude by some long dead, revered master, but not one produced by newfangled technology. Another reason was that dread word, "homosexuality". Both America and Britain introduced successively punitive laws against male homosexual activity - in Britain, lesbianism was never illegal, Queen Victoria instructing her government to remove the criminalizing clause in the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, on the grounds that she couldn't believe two women could or would make love - and male nude photography was perhaps perceived as an incitement to such activity. Remember, they had no notion of innate sexual orientation - homosexuality was not even a medical condition, but a sin. German Lutheranism was far less puritanical in our understanding of it. From the 1870s onward, Bismark's Germany - where homosexuality was initially completely legal and lawful - was increasingly a militaristic society, where male prudery, as in all armies, was a joke - and where traditional attitudes to nudity were decidedly libertarian. France and Italy were Catholic societies, where the sexes lived together domestically but existed in virtually separate worlds. I bet that not one of mothers of the Italian or French models recently seen here, would have had a clue that their little Giovanni or Jean had stripped off and been photographed. Just some thoughts from the top of my head...

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  4. Wonderful, so nonchalant, I wish I was him. Yes, to add my own musings, perhaps he was used to being nude for exercise and was asked to pose either for a record for himself or as a life model reference. There are a number of "costume" photographs of young men of this era. I wonder if, considering the surprisingly liberal attitudes to nudity,at least some would have had nude photographs taken as well. In my middle class English family, my uncle and his "best fiend" were, looking at them aged about 18 both photographed as Greek youths. They were both keen sports men, handsome and well built,especially keen playing cricket. This would have been around 1925. Perhaps the very end of an enlightened period.

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    1. Should have said they were in Greek youth costumes, not nude. But this topic got me thinking.

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    2. I hadn't thought of the exercise angle. Thanks for sharing your musings.

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