The Nude in the Album: Materiality and Erotic Narrative

Abstract

This article considers two compilations containing photographs of undressed women. The first is an album in the standard definition, “compiled by a painter for figure studies” in the 1890s. The second is an extra-illustrated book published in 1896 with a number of images of nude and partially nude women glued in to the text. In both, the inclusion of nude photographs heightens their function as suggestions of sexual sequence, the unfolding of a series of events or encounters. By arranging their photographs within the pages of a bound object, the creators fashioned not only mnemonic aides, but active eroticized narratives, for their own use and perhaps for the use of a select audience of viewer-friends. The narrative experiences produced through the act of looking would have been heightened by the materiality of the photographs contained within them. The two examples considered here also offer the possibility of viewing the wide stylistic range of a certain genre that can otherwise be difficult to see: the nineteenth-century photographic nude. The album format and the narrative it enables, combined with the tactility and physicality of the photographs themselves, enhances the inherent eroticism of the images. These two albums operate as analogs for understanding the relationships between intimacy, memory, and desire, and the way these are activated through the performance of looking and touching. They exist at the rich intersection of visual and material studies, as both images and things, meant to be seen and touched.