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The nude has always been a special problem for photographers. The photographic image was closer to optical reality than the other arts, which meant that one traditional way of defending modesty, by declaring the unreality of the model,
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was weaker in photography. The other traditional methods of defending modesty were hard to execute in photography: it's difficult to photograph what can't exist,
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and more disturbing to the eye when you do.
Photographers tended to flee into two solutions: one was an imitation of Academic painting.
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Image courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive
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Like the nude in Academic painting itself, the Academicizing photograph could come close to turning into a respectable substitute for pornography.
The other way to salvation was into stylization, which became geometricism.
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The danger down that path was strangeness and ugliness, though Rosalind Maingot seems somehow always to have managed to steer clear of them.
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