| Naked people have been around for quite some time. Ever since people evolved/ were invented, in fact. It wasn't until 1845, however, that the first nude photos were circulated at opticians, instrument makers and art dealerships (gee, how about those times when you could go pick up a pair of glasses and some porn from the optician? The good old days...).
The original porn photos were predominantly made by and for men, and the
images varied from sedate back/butt view photos to hetero and lesbian sex. To 'please'
the menfolk of the day, the producers commissioned a lot of pictures of
fellatio and hetero sexual acts. Unlike modern porn, the depiction of
lesbian acts were more rare than male homosexual acts, in spite of the
fact that
the latter was a crime in those days.
In the 1870s postcard porn was invented, and from 1890 to 1930 it was
hugely popular. The cards were the result of developments in the
mass production of photography, and showed more 'lewd' images.
Previously,
it was common to take the original photo, then take a photo of that one,
and so on, to get multiple copies. This is why many early porn images have
pin holes in the corners, as the photo was taken of another stuck on a
wall.
In France,
from 1919 to 1939, over 20,000,000 'nudie' postcards were
sold. Again, hetero, lesbian and fellatio images were the most common
and
expected. However, these
cards sometimes depicted women
committing acts of bestiality with dogs. Of course today these photos
are
illegal, but apparently in France in 1919 dogs were considered sexual
objects (oh yeah, Fido...).
From the get-go, governments were against the "obscene" work of early
pornographers. In 1802 Britain had a specific task force to fight
porn,
and after 1850 much porn was suppressed and destroyed by authorities. The
US, also eager
to catch the nude photos and 'art' which
circulated via the mail service, began a campaign against such porn (so much for privacy and mail laws).
In spite of the attempts of the conservatives, the black market
pornographers made a killing. A mass market from across the globe (Cuba,
France, England, the US and Japan) bought the racy pictures and,
presumably, got hours of pleasure from them. The Victorian era hid a
sexy
eroticism, which in turn hid the really 'hardcore' porn of the day,
best
summed up by Michael Koetzle in '1000 Nudes', 1994:
"Artistic nudes make no promises, erotic nudes make a few, and obscene
or
pornographic works so completely fulfill them all that many viewers find
them offensive rather than exciting". That is to
say,
to each his (or her) own when it comes (no pun intended) to porn.
So who exactly was posing for these racy shots, if they were so damn
illegal and secret? Well, that's a secret lost to the ages. It's
assumed most were prostitutes who saw porn as their 'big break' out of
their hard-luck lives. Other models are said to be mental patients who
were unaware of what they were doing and the implications of their
actions. The names of the photographers are also a mystery, as they were
predominantly amateur artists, relative unknowns in the art world.
We've come a long way from black and white and sepia copies of copies
of
copies of porn photos. Just look at the highly erotic (?!) ASCII porn E2
has collected...
Information from Forbidden Erotica, The Rotenberg Collection,
Taschen, 2000
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