Naked Women: The Female Nude in Photography from 1850 to the Present Day [Paperback]

Phil Braham (Author), Martha Casanave (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 2001

Naked Women explores the subject of the female nude in photography in all its beauty and variety, with selections from ninety of the world's most renowned photographers, dating from 1850 to the present day. The reader is taken through a wide range of artistic styles from pictorialism to realism, from surrealism to postmodernism; viewing and understanding the historic images of Edward Muybridge and Bill Brandt; the established sexiness of Herb Ritts; and the quirkiness of emerging stars of the contemporary scene such as Angel Baccassino. While maintaining their individual style and interpretation of the female form, each photographer has been chosen for the impact they have made on the genre and on photography as an art, as well as for the beauty of their images, and the technical prowess with which they are achieved. Printed four-color throughout, the photographs are glorious and irresistibly eye-catching. Includes work from well-known photographers and artists such as Araki, Eve Arnold, Eugene Atget, Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Clarke, Lucien Clergue Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, Steven Meisel, Herb Ritts, Jan Saudek, Mario Testino, and Dorothy Wilding.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (October 28, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560253363
• ISBN-13: 978-1560253365
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,120,748 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The naked truth about Naked Women!, January 17, 2002

By 

Bill W. Dalton (Santa Ana, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Naked Women: The Female Nude in Photography from 1850 to the Present Day (Paperback)

To start with, you can disregard the editorial review above. It's so
inaccurate it might be talking about another book altogether!
Many of the photographers it mentions -- Angel Baccassino,
Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry
Clarke, Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, Steven Meisel, Herb Ritts,
and Mario Testino -- are NOT represented in this book! But the
others mentioned are here. And many more, too. Most of them
are unfamiliar to me, but I haven't followed the photographic
scene in a long time, so it's no reflection on then that I've never
heard of them. Some of the great ones I do remember are here,
such as Edward Weston, Edward Steichen, Eadweard Muybridge,
Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Eugene Atget, Imogen
Cunningham, and Brassai.

Having tried my hand at photographing the female nude some
years back, I know it's not as easy as one might think to get good,
professional, artistic results. One needs more than a naked woman
and a camera! One needs some inspiration, intuition, creativity,
and rapport with the subject or the most expensive equipment and
the most shapely woman won't achieve much but vapid,
amateurish, or lewd photos. My own limited attempt at the genre
was interesting and enjoyable, but I knew I had no talent for it. So
I can respect even more the really great photographers who have
mastered this difficult art form.

The photographs here range from 19th century pictorialism to 21st
century modern abstract. Some of them are really striking, such as
Paul Murphy's topless portrait of a 70 year old woman posing like
a glamour girl, her drawn and weathered face and arms in stark
contrast to her remarkably young-looking smooth breasts! And
Jan Zwart's study of two women, a Moslem and a Westerner, with
the Moslem woman covered from head to toe in a Burka with only
her eyes showing, and the Western woman completely naked
except that her eyes are covered! An interesting, ironic comment
on two distinctly different cultures. Jemima Stehli's self-portrait
with her nude model is also good, but it would have had more
impact if she, too, had been nude. Lewis Morley's demure nude
portrait of Christine Keeler, the woman who brought down the
British government in 1963 with the Profumo scandal, belies the
tumult she once caused. She looks like an innocent school-girl
here. And John Knill's photo titled simply "Bottom" is just that --
a large image of a very impressive, curvaceous female bottom.

This book is for adults only. Some of the images are quite
graphic. Some are just ugly and others grotesque. A few are so
abstract that the subject, a nude, is unrecognizable as such. So it
pretty much covers the whole spectrum of nude photography as an
art form. I recommend it to all fans of the female form in
photography.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I was pleased with this purchase, February 26, 2002

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Naked Women: The Female Nude in Photography from 1850 to the Present Day (Paperback)

I really like the format of this book - one page with a large photo, the opposite page with the bio about the photographer and some information about the chosen work. It's a heavy book and of good quality, and the photos range from abstract to classic to fetish and everything in between. Some you have seen before, a lot are by new names and pics. I think it is a great companion to the Male version - "Exposed".

My only question is that is doesn't really seem to be any "history" - just a collection of good photos from a wide time range - think perhaps the title makes it seem something it is not.

I liked the book and have it on my coffee table.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Women - Not just the ones you expected., December 16, 2004

By 

wiredweird "wiredweird" (Earth, or somewhere nearby) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Naked Women: The Female Nude in Photography from 1850 to the Present Day (Paperback)

As the editor points out in the intro, "nude" usually means "nude European female 20-ish, and probably thin."

This book does a lot better. Yes, the subjects are mostly or all nude, and yes they're all women. No, they are not all Anglo, as Phan, Sullivan, and Torcello show. No, they are not all young adults, as Murphy and Kander show. No, they are not all thin, as Glover, Casanave, and Perotte show.

Yes, they are fully functioning women, as O'Sullivan and Fink show, with surprising tributes to physical motherhood. And yes, the female shape is a wonderful thing, simply as a shape, as Carnegie, Lategan, and others show - whatever it is they show.

These pictures give much to think about. Saudek's "Ballerine" proves that age strikes different parts of a woman differently. Look at this portrait again, but not the face, to see what I mean - youth lasts a lot longer than you might think. Go back to Braham's Flower and allow yourself a giggle before you even see where the humor lies. Go all the way forward to Zeschin's contribution, and see why 'bigger is better' just isn't true. Not false, surely, but not true.

The book is organized alphabetically by the working name (not necessarily the born name) of the photographer. In other words, it is utterly random with respect to dates, style, subject, technique, or any other aspect of the images themselves. This emphasizes the photos, the individual women, and the spectrum of womanhood. Still, it leaves me hanging in some intellectual sense - is there some underlying order that I've missed, or is it my job to impose my own order?

I am passionate about women's beauty, as is the editor. Whatever you may have thought, this is a clearly non-erotic view of womanhood, in most cases. Being bare, even being fully sexually functional, are different from being erotic.

-- wiredweird