Larry Fink
[Photographer, b. 1941, Brooklyn, New York, lives in Martins Creek, Pennsylvania.]
These were not models or abstract women wandering into my studio room but women who I have known as people and as real. To me photographing the nude is simply using my camera to sense and feel the pulse of life... I am interested in photographing of women as people, not the photographing of women as stigma, or the photographing of women as flesh or smut or form or any number of essentially superficial aesthetic devices in which the photographer’s fragile ego tends to dabble.
Ruth Bernhard
[Photographer, b. 1905, Berlin, d. 2006, San Francisco.]
[The nude] represents to me the same universal innocence, timelessness, and purity as do all seed pods (suggesting the mother as well as the child, the parental as well as the descendants,) conceived according to nature’s longing. The human body implies its reproductive function, its vitality and its continuity.
Susie Bright
[Writer, feminist, and activist, b. 1958, Arlington, Virginia, lives in Santa Cruz, California.]
Seeing lesbian photography is just the tip of my radicalized clitoris. I have modeled for, commissioned, published, and fought for these pictures, and answered threats against them. I’ve seen the feminist movement bring these pictures to life, and I’ve seen that same movement try to suppress the liberating results.
Jeanloup Sieff
[Photographer, b. 1930, Paris, d. 2001, Paris.]
All aspects of photography interest me and I feel for the female body the same curiosity and the same love as for a landscape, a face or anything else which interests me. In any case, the nude is a form of landscape. There are no reasons for my photographs, nor any rules; all depends on the mood of the moment, on the mood of the model.
Bill Brandt
[Photographer, b. 1904, Hamburg, Germany, d. 1983, London.]
A good nude photograph can be erotic, but certainly not sentimental or pornographic.
Michael Ondaatje
[Writer, b. 1943, Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), lives in Toronto, Canada.]
Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight.
(On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
Paul Outerbridge
[Photographer, b. 1896, New York, d. 1958, Laguna Beach, California.]
What this country needs is more and better nudes.
Edmund Teske
[Photographer, b. 1911, Chicago, Illinois, d. 1996, Los Angeles.]
I show the beauty and the wonder of the male nude and I show him in terms of his position as lord of the lingam.
