Abigail Solomon-Godeau
[Writer and theorist, b. 1947, New York, lives in Santa Barbara, California.]
Whatever the elements that differentiate an art photograph of a female nude encountered in a museum from a photographic pin-up, both types of image may posit a similar—if not identical—set of subject/object relations, and induce or foster fantasies that are themselves symptoms of the unequal ordering of sexual difference [in a patriarchal society].
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
[Writer, photographer, mathematician, and logician, b. 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England, d. 1898, Guildford, Surrey, England.]
Mrs. Hatch came with Beatrice, Ethel, and Evelyn. I photographed all three: Evelyn naked—a kind of photo I have often done lately.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
My nudes are ideals of my own feelings about being a woman, not an expression of erotic power, or a love object.
Charis Wilson
[Model, b. 1914, San Francisco, d. 2009, Santa Cruz, California.]
Altogether it was a magical place. The silence and emptiness, the beauty of the wind-sculptured forms, the absence of any living things besides ourselves—all these combined to give me an exhilarating sense of freedom. As soon as the sun warmed things up, I took off my clothes and began diving down a steep slope... I was reminded of the childhood games of statues as I kept returning to the top of the bank to relaunch myself, and each slide down ended in a more abandoned position.
(On posing nude at 22 in the Oceano dunes for her 50-year-old lover Edward Weston.)
James Joyce
[Writer, b. 1882, Rathgar, Ireland, d. 1941, Zurich, Switzerland.]
...I could pose for a picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has nymphs used they go about like that I asked him about her and that word met something with hoses in it...
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
[Writer, photographer, mathematician, and logician, b. 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, England, d. 1898, Guildford, Surrey, England.]
If I had the loveliest child in the world to draw or photograph, and found that she had a modest shrinking (however slight, however easily overcome) from being taken nude, I would feel it was a solemn duty owed to God to drop the request
altogether.
Wynn Bullock
[Photographer, b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1975, Monterey, California.]
As I became aware that all things have unique spatial and temporal qualities which visually define and relate them, I began to perceive the things I was photographing not as objects but as events. Working to develop my skills of perceiving and symbolizing these event qualities, I discovered the principle of opposites. When, for example, I photographed the smooth, luminous body of a woman behind a dirty cobwebbed window, I found that the qualities of each event were enhanced and the universal forces which they manifested were more powerfully evoked.
Michael Ondaatje
[Writer, b. 1943, Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), lives in Toronto, Canada.]
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.
(On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
