The Nude is Never Neutral

This page brings together a selection of the texts that have shaped my poster, More Than Skin: Situational Ethics in Boudoir and Nude Photography. These writings helped me think through the ideas behind photographing boudoir and the nude, from ways of looking, and throughout the photographic encounter.

My own contribution comes from practice: as a working boudoir photographer and educator, I am concerned with the ethical conditions of making images within my photography business and how consent, power, authorship, and care are negotiated in the process of creating them.

Attwood examines how sexualised culture has become increasingly mainstream across media and everyday life. Her work helps frame the wider visual pressures and aesthetic norms that shape how sensual images are imagined, requested, and circulated.

Azoulay argues that photography should be understood not only as an image but as a political and relational event involving photographer, photographed person, and spectator. Her work is central to my thinking about photography as an ethical encounter rather than a finished object alone.

Berger’s book is foundational for thinking about how images organise ways of seeing, especially in relation to art, gender, and spectatorship. It informs my attention to how visibility is shaped before and beyond the moment of image-making.

Bordo analyses how cultural ideals, media images, and social pressures shape the body, especially in relation to weight, desire, control, and femininity. Her work informs my thinking about beauty norms, bodily autonomy, and the pressures that shape retouching requests.

Campt’s idea of “listening to images” shifts analysis away from surface appearance alone and toward the affective, historical, and relational force embedded in photographs. Although her book focuses on photographs of Black subjects in colonial and diasporic archives, it is valuable to nude photography for encouraging attention to the conditions and tensions that images carry beyond surface appearance.

Eichhorn examines what happens when images of younger selves persist online and remain easily retrievable. Her work is useful here for thinking about image permanence, the weakening of forgetting, and the value of retaining the power to revise or withdraw images from circulation.

A foundational text for the idea that ethical judgement cannot always be reduced to fixed rules and must respond to the particular circumstances of a situation. In my poster, Fletcher anchors the phrase situational ethics, but the application to nude photography is my own.

hooks develops the idea of the oppositional gaze as a critical and resistant mode of looking shaped by race, racism, and black female spectatorship. Her essay is important here because it makes clear that looking is historically unequal and contested rather than universal or innocent.

Mulvey’s essay is a foundational account of how visual pleasure and spectatorship are structured by gendered power. While her argument emerges from cinema rather than studio photography, it remains a key reference point for debates about the gaze.

Nead examines how the female nude is produced and regulated as a cultural form, including the boundaries between acceptable art, obscenity, and sexuality. Her work is especially relevant to the claim that the nude is never simply natural or neutral.

Rettberg explores how selfies, blogs, and other digital practices function as forms of self-representation and self-understanding. Her work is especially helpful for thinking about how visual identity is shaped in and through digital networks.

Spence’s book traces her development as a politically and psychologically conscious feminist photographer and reflects on how photography shapes identity across class, age, and gender. It is useful here as a practice-based feminist precedent for thinking about photographic authorship, embodiment, and the politics of representing bodies.

Thank you for taking the time to read my poster and explore these references. I hope you find them as thought-provoking and rewarding as I have.