Quotes by
Peter Lacey

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The female nude – magical, erotic, aesthetic – has been modeled and painted since prehistory. Appearing rarely and awkwardly in the earliest art, she attained fulfillment and glory in ancient Greece. In their idealized treatment of the nude, The Greeks established a standard that only the asceticism of the Middle Ages ignored. The artists of the Renaissance and their successors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revived the nude, and by the 1930’s she was again a conventional form. It was inevitable that she should become a favorite subject of photography.

Peter Lacey

(Introduction)

History of the Nude in Photography by Peter Lacey and Anthony La Rotonda

ISBN: 0552082473 Page: 6 This book is available from Amazon

#nude

The history on the nude in photography is the history of the developed styles of a relatively small number of imaginative photographers.

Peter Lacey

(Introduction)

History of the Nude in Photography by Peter Lacey and Anthony La Rotonda

ISBN: 0552082473 Page: 12 This book is available from Amazon

#nude

…photographers of England made the mistake of attempting to emulate painting. The few nudes visible in Victorian photographs are usually languid participants in banal, morally edifying allegorical arrangements. These photographs only emphasize the worst aspects of the paintings they strove to resemble. All in all, the nude found nineteenth-century England a chilly climate.

Peter Lacey

Introduction from The History of the Nude in Photography

History of the Nude in Photography by Peter Lacey and Anthony La Rotonda

ISBN: 0552082473 Page: 17 This book is available from Amazon

No other subject is so indicative of the photographer’s taste and talent as the nude.

Peter Lacey

"Popular Photography and Imaging" January 2007 (PDEF version), p.167

The question of the artistic status of photography has been continually discussed since the very invention of the camera. Those who do not believe it is an art point to the seemingly accidental nature of the process (the photographer has no real control over his medium to the degree that the artist has) and the fact the photograph is always a picture of a particular or real thing, whereas a painting or drawing is a generalization, an interpretation. This specific quality of the camera is never more apparent than in a photograph of a nude: we are looking at an individual, real woman. However, we will always misunderstand and under-appreciate the finest photography if we insist on judging it by the standards of fine art. What we must look for are photographs which combine the camera’s unique qualities with a sense of form and mood.

Peter Lacey

Introduction to the book The History of the Nude in Photography.

History of the Nude in Photography by Peter Lacey and Anthony La Rotonda

ISBN: 0552082473 This book is available from Amazon

Not only are photographers as a group more concerned with the expression of form and style through the nude than painters and sculptors today, but, it can be argued, photography is at present the last refuge of the nude. Today in art the nude, if she appears at all, is simply one more form among others. The expression of her moods and nuances, as well as her actual form, have been abandoned to the realism of photography.

Peter Lacey

Introduction from The History of the Nude in Photography

History of the Nude in Photography by Peter Lacey and Anthony La Rotonda

ISBN: 0552082473 Page: 23 This book is available from Amazon

Today, photographs of the nude are so commonly published and seen that we hardly notice individual pictures unless they are particularly shocking, or are of a famous actress, or (best of all) both.

Peter Lacey

Introduction - [Peter Lacey “The History of the Nude in Photography”, Transworld Publishers Ltd., London, 1969, p. 6]

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Quotes by
Peter Lacey