Nudity in Film - Nude Photography Before Cinema

Nude Photography Before Cinema

The first entertainer to pose nude for photographs was undoubtedly the stage actress Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–1868). A series of Menken photos survive in near pristine clarity.

Sarah Bernhardt early in her career posed topless on several occasions for French photographer Felix Nadar. She is nevertheless seen with her top covered in surviving stills of these sessions. At least one later topless photograph of the young Bernhardt made in 1873 survives. These nude sessions were not meant for outright public consumption but for the encouraging of theatrical employers or personal guests. Thus nude photos of women like Menken and Bernhardt are known only to scholars and perhaps theater buffs.

If total nudity was not achieved, then sheer nudity was. Skin-tight flesh-colored attire existed in the era immediately before the invention of motion pictures. Stage actresses would pose in very provocative attire leaving little to the imagination, for roles such as Lady Godiva.

In the 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge, at the dawn of the invention of the motion picture, used a device he called a zoopraxiscope to project a series of successive still photographs. The photos would then be played one after the other giving the illusion of movement. Sometimes the same sequence would be filmed using several cameras. Many of Muybridge's photographic sessions using the zoopraxiscope had nude anonymous models, both female and male, and indeed even Walt Whitman and George Bernard Shaw posed nude for a session.