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gallery
GRAPHICS EDITOR'S NOTE
The following Gallery essay by Marguerite Shaffer examines four nudist photographs spanning the twentieth century to the present. We publish these texts because they illustrate an evolution in thinking about the historic relationship between the human body and the natural environment. One of these images, of a postwar nuclear family camping at a nudist resort in the Rocky Mountains, has been cropped to exclude a second young girl, facing the camera and standing near the family's camp stove, from the photograph. The author and several editors of Environmental History, myself included, were uncomfortable modifying this historical document. After much discussion and debate, however, we decided not to include this young girl because of her age and her positioning in the photograph, but instead to acknowledge her presence in the historic record here, in a special Gallery editor's note.
NEIL M. MAHER
Marguerite S. Shaffer On the Environmental Nude
| IN 1934, A SHORT EDITORIAL in The Nudist, a magazine devoted to the practice of nudism in the United States, remarked on the censorship of Maurice Parmelee's Nudism in Modern Life under the provisions of the Tariff Act (1842), which empowered the U.S. Customs Department to ban the importation of obscene materials. Dr. Ilsley Boone, the editor, commented, "As one reads this decision one wonders that the propriety of pictures of all other living things such as animals and flowers of both sexes in close proximity is never questioned. That pictures of human beings are considered from an entirely different point of view is a curious manifestation of psychic twist."1 Boone's comments clearly reflect the nudist philosophy he sought to promote, but they also draw pointed attention to the cultural meaning of the environmental nude. |
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Invented in the fifth century by the Greeks, the nude is a form of art—an intentional artistic representation of the naked body—"the body re-formed" according to art historian Sir Kenneth Clark.2 Emerging from Hellenic thought, the classical nude sought to represent the connection "between an organic and a geometric basis of beauty."3 The term environmental nude builds on this tradition and identifies a little-studied subgenre of nude photography that emerged in connection with the philosophy and practice of organized nudism.4 Like its predecessor, the environmental nude seeks to draw attention to the connections between humans and nature. But where the Greek nude raised questions about the ideal of beauty, the environmental nude raises questions about what is natural. |
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In the early decades of the twentieth century, nudism, sometimes called "naturism," emerged as the organized practice of ritually exposing the body to the air, sun, water, and the elements (at least in temperate weather), combined with the freedom of body movement in communal exercise, play, and dance.5 Books such as Maurice Parmelee's Nudism in Modern Life and periodicals such as The Nudist, among others, advocated recreational communal nudity in such activities as group games, gymnastics, dance, formalized tableaux or poses, bathing, sun bathing, swimming, hiking, and other forms of exercise. Advocates argued that nudism celebrated the natural physical, aesthetic, and athletic form and function of the human body. As Parmelee's book philosophizes, nudism was about the nude practice of physical activities. Yet as the banning of the book suggests, it was also about the photographing and viewing of the nude. |
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