Category: female nude, nu féminin, weiblicher Akt, nudo femminile, desnudo femenino, nu femení

Betty Katz by Edward Weston

Edward H. Weston (1886 – 1958) ~ Betty Katz (‘nude’), Los Angeles, 1920. Palladium print | src The J. Paul Getty Museum
Edward H. Weston (1886 – 1958) ~ Betty Katz [Betty Brandner], 1920 | src The J. Paul Getty Museum

In 1920 Edward Weston began a series of pictures of Betty Katz (later Brandner, 1865-1982), who was introduced to Weston by his colleague Margrethe Mather (1886-1952). Weston and Brandner engaged in a brief affair in October 1920, when he made this and several other images of her in her attic and out on a balcony. With its soft focus, these particular portraits are Pictorialist in style compared to the more experimental images Weston made of Katz (Brandner) that are Modernist in their self-conscious handling of space and form.

Text adapted from Brett Abbott. Edward Weston, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 20. (quoted from Getty Museum)

Claire Bauroff as Countess Zichy

Trude Fleischmann :: Dancer Claire Bauroff, full-figure portrait, naked in a dance scene as Countess Zichy, 1923. Published by ‘Die Dame’ April 1923. | originally posted on and censored by tumblr

Anita Berber, 1923

József Pécsi :: Dancer Anita Berber, for Introduction to dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy, a collaboration between Anita Berber & Sebastian Droste, Berlin 1923. Published in Revue des Monats. (digitally retouched by la petite melancolie) | censored by tumblr from haunted·by·storytelling

La prière by Man Ray, 1930

Man Ray :: La prière | The prayer, 1930. Ferrotyped gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1960
Signed, dated and numbered ‘0/8’ in ink (recto); signed and annotated ‘original’ in pencil (verso) | src Christie’s

Seated Nude, ca. 1908-1916

paul burty haviland seated nude 1908-1916
Paul Burty Haviland (French, 1880-1950) :: Seated Nude, ca. 1908-1916. Platinum print. | src RISD Museum
Paul Burty Haviland (French, 1880-1950) :: Seated Nude, ca. 1908-1916. Platinum print. | src RISD Museum

With its diffuse lighting and soft tones, Paul Haviland’s Seated Nude demonstrates his stylistic allegiance to the Photo-Secession group of American photographers.
Haviland was a French émigré and heir to a successful porcelain manufacturing firm, but after meeting Alfred Stieglitz in 1908, he devoted the next decade to establishing the legitimacy of photography as a form of high art. He published both photographs and essays in Camera Work, the preeminent American journal of avant-garde art, and helped found its successor, 291. This image is similar to photos of female nudes published by Haviland’s colleagues, with the model assuming an unusual and contorted pose in a hazy, empty interior space, her face turned away or concealed in shadow.

Quoted from Changing Poses: The Artists’ Model