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Photographers geometricized the female body to solve problems of social acceptability which they felt might be greater in photography, and so that they could feel themselves to be participating in the revolutions of Modern Art. Some of these geometricizations work, and some make our eyes burn. The difference between them has almost nothing to do with either nudity or femaleness, and even less to do with photography. It's created by the different objects at which we look when we look at an artwork.
When we look at a photograph of a woman, we're really looking at least three different objects: the woman represented in the photograph (or the painting, or the story, or whatever), the image of a woman on the surface, and the artificial objects which are part of the fragment of surface itself. We haven't the least objection to seeing geometric objects in the surface distorted into forms which we have never seen before, if the woman herself does not seem to be holding a strange or uncomfortable pose.
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Why should we? After all, the geometric objects themselves are new and artificial constructs to which we feel no special attachment.
If the image of the woman is distorted,
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we start to get a little nervous. (This will tend to happen when the pose is one which could almost occur in daily life, and which doesn't stand in a simple relationship to the plane of the picture.) The distortion of the image at that level starts to remind us of the possibility of distorting the body itself. And any distortion of the human body will disturb us, since the body could almost as well be our own. Distorting a female nude is a little worse, since the female nude has become the symbol of luxury, calm, and pleasure. For the same reason, when the distortion is not at the level of the representation of the woman, but of the woman being represented,
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we will find it even more distressing, and the photograph will usually fail. It will indeed be revolutionary and new, but will only succeed in being a new kind of disturbance.
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