From burlesque to bold nudes: the female artists who transformed erotic photography
Marilyn Monroe is emblematic of the enigma of celebrity.
Although she is still one of the most famous women in history, the unadorned Marilyn Monroe remains a mystery. She started out in an orphanage, got a job painting army supplies in a war effort warehouse and ended up becoming one of the first pop culture paradigms for the great engine of social mobility that was fame.
However, with her meteoric rise wrapped in rumour, salacious gossip and leaked nude images, she remained guarded in her own liberated way. Despite the howling press, she did not regress into herself, even when nude images hit the headlines in the staunchly conservative era she arose, she proudly took ownership of them and brought about further progression.
It was a mark of a woman reclaiming her own sexual dominion, and it proved trailblazing. Although there had been plenty of precursors, in America, this was a pivotal moment when the world of erotic photography rightly had the subject’s names alongside the photographers, and stars were born from this pioneering frontier of liberated flesh.
“I think sexuality is only attractive when it is natural,” Monroe once said in a 1962 interview with LIFE magazine. “We are all born as sexual creatures, thank God, but it is a shame that so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, emerges from it, from everything. I never understood what this ‘sexual symbol’ was; I always thought symbols were those things that collide with each other! That’s the problem, a sex symbol becomes a thing, I just hate being a thing. But if I’m going to be a symbol of something, I prefer to have something that is not a symbol.”
“The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.”
Marilyn Monroe
From then on, counterculture developed its own take on the libertine ways of 1920/30s Berlin. The art of the pin-up is now combined with the daring age of pop culture. Now, stars like Bettie Page were pushing boundaries, combining sex appeal, charm, and dignified individualism.
As her official biography states: “Without imagining the consequences on any conscious level, Bettie found that her provocative cheesecake photographs during the period of 1950 through 1957 violated all manner of sexual taboos and finally invoked a United States Senate Committee investigation.”
This ‘Queen of Pin Ups’ spawned many more, and they changed the gaze of how erotic art was viewed. Dita Von Teese would come along further down the line, and she advocated a progressive mental attitude to flesh among women with remarks like, “I make a point to never, ever point out my physical flaws… this is advice I give to women as often as I can. People don’t notice the things we see in ourselves that we hate, so why direct them to it?”
“I think it’s kind of turning the old-fashioned ideas of feminism upside down,” Von Teese added. “You can’t decide for someone what is degrading or empowering, because some people could look at my show and say, ‘Oh that’s so degrading to women,’ but then you’re thinking, ‘How is that degrading to women when there’s all the women who are supporting it and they’re getting inspiration from it and they’re happy to see a different version of sensuality?'”
“One of the last taboos to be liberated is to revel in being objectified, and I feel like indulging in taboos sometimes is a way to liberate them,” Von Teese said. “What you’re watching are my obsessions come alive on stage, my sexual fantasies, and in my sexual fantasies, things are not politically correct. I’m super grateful to the women who paved the way and made this burlesque movement even possible, because it was much different for them… A lot of them were looked down upon. But I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t wandered into a strip club in 1991.”
This trend of taking back dominion over sexuality and making sure that eroticism is not simply faceless objectification has continued. And its journey is displayed in the Taschen publication, The Little Big Book of Pussy. As the blurb reads: “Now you can follow the evolution of genital exposure with ease, through 100 years of photos with one thing in common: the exhibitionistic pleasure with which the models present their feminine pulchritude.”
The women who changed erotic photography:
