French photographer Charles Naudet is little known in the history of photography. His surviving works comprise photographs of women (some clothed, some fully nude) posing against a decorative backdrop in what might be a home studio. His photographs have not entered the canon of the history of photography. Rather, they are a fascinating side note—early examples of the photographic depiction of the nude female form.
Naudet was active in the 1890s, just over half a century after the invention of one of the first photographic processes—the Daguerreotype—by his fellow Frenchman Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851). Daguerre, an illusionist and showman who painted backdrops for theatrical productions, invented the Diorama, a device that created miniature worlds out of paintings through skillful lighting effects and cleverly moving parts. It is fitting that history credits Daguerre with the invention of photography, which could be described as the greatest illusion of them all.
Daguerre made his first successful photographic image, The Artist’s Studio, in 1837. It depicts two sculptures of cherub’s faces, a framed print, and other picturesque items arranged into a still life in a corner of the photographer’s studio. This image is an indication that the medium of photography was born into a convoluted relationship with art. Photography was initially perceived as a technology that would replace painting, however, the first photographers adopted well-established pictorial conventions from painting. Indeed Daguerre began his career as a painter, and his debut photograph is indebted to these conventions: he composed a still life of art objects.
Though Daguerre’s invention did not cause all painters to put down their brushes, it did destroy one form of art: miniature portrait painting. In its first few decades, photography became hugely popular as a more convenient and less expensive portrait medium. By the 1890s, the sensitivity of photographic materials had vastly improved, allowing photographers to make portraits without the use of the neck braces and other devices previously necessary to hold their subjects motionless. Sometime during this decade, Charles Naudet invited young women to take off their clothes and display themselves for his camera.
The Solari Foundation Collection contains an album of Naudet’s photographs titled Nus Compléts Danseuses Musiciennes (Full Nudes Dancers Musicians). The small album (about 4 x 7 inches) is bound in red board with a hand-written title card, and contains fifty photographs approximately 4 x 3 inches in size. The photographs depict variations on a theme featuring nude young women against a backdrop accentuated by a few props.
The title of Naudet’s album is misleading (though it would be clearly understood by a particular clientele), since it appears that almost all of the photographs it contains are of the same woman. She poses awkwardly, casting doubt on the suggestion that she could be a dancer, and the musical instruments that appear in some of the images are clearly decorative rather than functional. Though Naudet’s subject might have been a singer, artist, or artist’s model, it is also possible that she was his lover, a prostitute, or simply a woman in need of money who was willing to disrobe to receive it.
The patterning of Naudet’s backdrops, the jewelry worn by his subjects, and the elaborate furniture that appears in some of his photographs indicate that Naudet was mimicking or referencing French Orientalist painting, such as the odalisques of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867). Orientalism fetishized and eroticized eastern countries, presenting those places and their inhabitants as foreign or “other” to French viewers. The visual reference to Orientalism in Naudet’s photographs allows his models to be perceived as lascivious foreigners who do not need to be held to the same standards of propriety as young Frenchwomen, relieving those who gaze upon their nude bodies of any moral responsibility.
Like Daugerre’s still life, Naudet’s photographs are derivative of painting conventions. Naudet was not a brilliant or original photographer—he simply borrowed a style that was already out of date in order to photograph naked women. Naudet’s pictures fail to create a successful illusion. His primary model seems less a beautiful, exotic creature, and more a bashful, awkward girl. Yet it is precisely in this failure that Naudet’s photographs become
interesting. In a painting, an illusion can be complete; in a photograph, it can only be suggested. Questions of the real encroach on Naudet’s images:
Who was this woman? What was she doing posing naked in front of a camera? Why does Naudet suggest (in a handwritten postscript below one photograph) that she looks as if she is six months pregnant?
In one photograph, Naudet’s model poses next to a miniature replica of a Greek statue of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love whose identity is synonymous with pleasure and beauty. The model contemplates the statue, bending her left knee in an unconvincing attempt to replicate the statue’s pose. The model holds her left hand to her breast, pressing it upward and presenting it to the viewer in comparison to Aphrodite’s nude breast. Unwittingly (or perhaps according to Naudet’s instructions), the model created a visual trope within a trope—a photograph imitating a painting depicting life imitating art.
Rosalind Shipley
Charles Naudet, Nus Compléts Danseuses Musiciennes (album), c. 1890, printing out paper, 10.8 x 7 cm, SOLARI 94.002.009L