Ethnographic Photography
This tentatively called "ethnographic" nudity has appeared both in serious research works on ethnography and anthropology, as well as in commercial documentaries and in the National Geographic magazine in the United States. In some cases, media outlets may show nudity which occurs in a "natural" or spontaneous setting in news programs or documentaries, while blurring out or censoring the nudity in a dramatic work. The ethnographic focus provided an exceptional framework for photographers to depict peoples whose nudity was, or still is, acceptable within the mores, or within certain specific settings, of their traditional culture.
Detractors of ethnographic nudity often dismiss it as mere colonial gaze preserved as "ethnographic" imagery. However, the works of some ethnographic painters and photographers, like Irving Penn, Casimir Zagourski, Hugo Bernatzik and Leni Riefenstahl, have received worldwide acclaim for preserving what is perceived as a documentation of the dying mores of "paradises" subjecty to the onslaught of average modernity.
Read more about this topic: Depictions Of Nudity, Scientific
Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)