Photographic Display

The first fine arts museum in France to pursue a policy of acquisitions and exhibitions of early photography, the Musée d'Orsay now has a rich collection of over 46,000 photographs (consisting mainly of original prints, but also including negatives, daguerreotypes, autochromes and photomechanical prints, among others). Started from scratch in 1979, it has continued to expand to this day with an aim of complementarity with existing public collections, through purchases and gifts, and with the addition of several long-term loans from various French institutions.
It provides an exemplary overview of the phenomenon that is photography, in all its diversity – artistic or documentary practices, the work of amateurs, etc – extending from 1839, the officially recognised date of its invention, to around 1918.

Because of the sensitivity of the photographs to light, this collection cannot be put on permanent display. But as well as the major photographic exhibitions and multi-disciplinary events that they regularly enhance, the museum ensures their visibility through displays that are renewed every three months.

Currently: The confusion of genres

Cabinet de photographie, room 19
15 April-July 2013

Wilhelm von GloedenÉphèbe© Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Images of naked bodies appear in disconcerting numbers in the Musée d’Orsay photographic collection. Their sheer diversity leads one to wonder about this category of images, and their many and varied uses, paradoxically ubiquitous in a century when modesty reigned supreme.
Far from covering every movement in the history of photography that took the nude as its subject, this collection, based on accepted artistic criteria, consists of works mainly from the field of art: prints used by academies to replace long sittings in the studio; studies and documents proposing a range of gestures and forms for painters, sculptors and decorators; photographs produced by the artists themselves as they started to experiment when the technique became less complicated towards the end of the 1880s; as well as the "artistic" nudes taken at the turn of the century by the Pictorialists, who sought to compete with the perfection of painting or drawing.

This later movement brought the nude into photographic exhibitions for the first time, although its erotic power was tempered in various ways: soft focus and the interplay of light and shadow, the clever use of drapery to cover the genital organs, retouching to conceal hair and imperfections, and by the delicate techniques of photomechanical printing.

Eugène Atget Nu de dos dans un intérieur © RMN-Grand Palais (musée d'Orsay) / Michèle Bellot

Whereas in painting and in sculpture the genre of the nude aimed to glorify the beauty of the human body or to use its forms allegorically, a photograph of a nude confirmed the existence there and then of an individual model, and revealed her anatomy in all its crude reality, allowing us to glimpse, according to Disdéri (1862), "unattractive legs, coarse ankles and knees, poorly concealed calluses".

From the fascinating precision of the early daguerreotypes, delicately coloured and enhanced by the three dimensional stereoscopic effect, and which often appropriated the conventions of life drawing (teasing looks, accessories clearly associated with the boudoir, the use of gauze and mirrors to conceal and yet reveal) to the ethnographic pretext that noted and detailed differences to make the nude photograph more acceptable, and from the hermaphrodite photographed by Nadar in order to draw attention to an anatomical peculiarity to Stieglitz’s portrait without head of Georgia O'Keeffe, celebrating the body of his love, and including, finally, the staging of erotic fantasies intended for private use, one conclusion emerges from this exhibition: the nude in photography is not a genre.