Reading Time: 4 minutes Each year, British Journal of Photography presents its Ones To Watch – a group of emerging image-makers,…
“In the patriarchy in which we live, photography is an expression of power,” wrote Charlotte Jansen in BJP’s Female Gaze issue. “The photographic act is often viewed as an assertion of masculine dominance; a predatory point and shoot action.”
For this reason, nude photography – historically populated by female subjects, shot by men – has long been pervaded by gratuitousness and exploitation. But as both photography and society continue to open up to women – likewise to members of the LGBTQ community, to non-Westerners, and to people who aren’t white – what becomes of the nude then?
The Nude Collection explores the evolution of the genre as it unfolds in contemporary society, from a vehicle of eroticism to a force for political potency: a means of reclaiming the body as a site of pleasure and possibility.