Very little of what passes as “fine art nude” photography has anything to do with art. Mostly, “fine art nudes” hide prurience behind decorative beauty, or mask neurotic conflicts over sexuality behind the distancing and idealizing functions of the camera, or both.

Art always signifies—it says something, has meaning. Art aims at truth. Photography, like all visual and plastic arts, matters because not all truths can be comprehended, or best conveyed, in words.

The aesthetic qualities of the image must serve the message—they induce in the viewer moods, emotions, and associations congruent with the meaning of the work. That’s one of many reasons beauty is most often beside the point, if not outright destructive to an artist’s intent—most truths are not beautiful.

And art always takes place in a context. Art is a form of communication—it says something to a community of participants. The meanings, concerns, values, and habits of the community are integral to what the art can and does mean.  When art achieves timelessness, it does so by speaking to universal, essential human concerns.  Almost none of us reach that level of genius. Most of us are simply of our time and place; we can hope, at best, to say something of significance to our contemporaries.  

I think that the art of the nude, whether photographic or otherwise, exists in a complicated context at present.

It’s no longer true (if it ever was) that “the Right Wing” is simply puritanical, what with the biggest profiteers from sexual imagery now being major corporations (and Republican donors). 

The Left, which has always been fitful and conflicted about embracing the body, often seems more Victorian and condescending about physical life than most of us who remember the Sixties ever thought it would become.

While digital imaging and the Internet have made nude imagery ubiquitous, one would be hard-pressed to make a case that much of this is more than entertaining, at best; and one needn’t be a conservative to fear that, since so much internet nudity decouples the body from intimacy and self-possession, it’s not a force for insight and uplift.

Our society’s many, contradictory attitudes toward our bodies, our sexuality, intimacy, and connections between persons make intelligent discourse—verbal or in images—very challenging. Anyone who claims to do “fine art nude photography” needs to have something to say on these issues, to understand what makes the camera especially apt for bearing his or her message, and to have the imagination and technical capacity to realize in his or her art something true.

Only a few of the images on this site can claim even to approach this standard.

I’m currently on hiatus from this work, in hopes of understanding better what would be required to do it well. Should I come back to it, I hope to do better in the future.

Bob Fancher