Nudity

Nudity is powerful. I suppose we all feel its power, though we may not want to feel it or want to see nudity in a picture. It goes without saying that nudity is powerful partly because sex is powerful. But another reason it’s powerful, and one of the reasons it has always interested artists, is that it exposes more than just a body. The naked body is expressive of more than itself; its defenselessness brings us closer to the person inhabiting it. In its paradoxically powerful vulnerability, nudity is not unlike art itself when it is the most worthy of our respect. I imagine the artists themselves usually make this connection and are identifying with their nude subjects at one level or another. The nudity of pornography doesn’t have a lot of this kind of power. The same goes for excessively beautified nudity in any form. In the same way that a too-perfect face stops being expressive and is effectively a mask, a too-perfect body is a suit of armor. Another problem with pornography (as opposed to sexuality) is something like the problem with comedy (as opposed to humor). Pornography is aimed directly at us: it has a commercial reason for trying to evoke one very specific response. For those of us who most value cultural products without so easily expressed a purpose and who don’t like being solicited, pornography is something to be resisted. Nudity in snapshots is never pornographic, even when the intention is in some sense sexual: with snapshots we’re in an entirely nonprofessional and noncommercial world. A snapshot of a naked person is still in every way a snapshot and conforms to every generalization we can make about snapshots. So although deliberate self-display can be seen in snapshots, often full of vanity and attempted glossiness in imitation of true pornography, the show is not for our benefit. Snapshots don’t know about us and they don’t intend to titillate us (though they can, of course). Pornography is all about money; the sex is just a way to earn it. But even the filthiest snapshot has nothing to do with money. Snapshot sex and snapshot nudity are about sex and nudity. Snapshot nudity is snapshot intimacy taken to an extreme. The vulnerability of snapshot nudity is extreme too, it seems to me, because its publication is a poignant accident of a kind that can’t happen in another medium: a snapshot nude takes a very private situation and, by bringing us on it, makes it anything but private. I might say that snapshot nudity is nuder than nudity in photography usually is, because no one thought we would see what we see; the behavior of people in snapshots is that much more unself-conscious and revealing, and we are aware that we are getting a privileged view of something completely private. And so we may feel a little bad for looking, in a way that we do not in the case of nudity intentionally exposed to us. The other side of the heightened particularity of the traditional nude figure is of course its universality. But here again, snapshot nudity is nuder. It makes no attempt to generalize: with rare exceptions, there is no iconic human form in snapshots. That’s because, as found, snapshots just aren’t art. There’s nothing iconic at all in snapshots; everything is specific. A naked person in a snapshot really is that person and can’t hide behind the fig leaf of some grand idea.

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