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In a quasi-biography based on a life in early Twentieth-Century Alexandria, James Hamilton-Paterson claims that because of a mixture of racism and hypocrisy, French - and presumably other European - girlie photographs at that time tended to show mainly women who were obviously non-Europeans. The concept is largely correct, and is one of the explanations for the emphasis on the exotic in the in both Romanticism and Neo-Classicism, especially in the visual arts.
The enterprising were cashing in on that delightful piece of racist doublethink which made it possible to get away with pictures of girls with nothing on so long as they were not Europeans. Basically, the blacker and more 'native' they were the more you could have close-ups of their breasts and pretend that any interest they aroused was anthropological. The French always had a good line in these.... Girls with bare nipples would be subtitled something faintly educational like Jeune Mauresque.... This kind of meet-the-nations photography had been going on since at least the eighteen-seventies and in 1936 it was still a staple....
While there's certainly a lot of truth in what Hamilton-Paterson says, the point about the foreign women shouldn't be emphasized too strongly. The Western world was flooded by very similar photographs of French and other Western women, often sold in the streets of France as "académies", trying to get their pseudo-legitimacy from a different angle. (You can still find plenty of them for sale on eBay, both original and reprinted.)
And as long as we've mentioned the "art nouveau" académies on eBay, there's another point about them worth noting: For some reason the passage of time has changed them from obvious pornography to works which really do have a significant art-historical interest. Once again, we are forced to conclude that the physical artwork is not whole in itself: its artness is to a great extent created by the viewer, who is strongly under the influence of his own social context as he creates it.
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