BERLIN, DE—Looking for a beautiful yet tiny Valentine's Day gift for a love done? After all, it's often been said that good things come in small packages, and anyone who's watch adult videos featuring 5-foot-nothing women can probably attest to the truth of that—but Goliath Books' slipcased volume, Photographia Erotica Historica, measuring less than three inches in height, should cement that truism in each reader's mind.
Photographia Erotica Historica is bound in leather and embossed in gold for a terrific old-timey feel, but within its 380 pages—including 200 vintage photos, with some text in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish—readers will find what the company describes as "photographic obscenities from the turn of the century." (The 19th century, that is.)
Ever since the invention of photography, inventors like France's Louis Daguerre have been interested in photographing nudes, with the body images linked directly to the popular poses in paintings and sculptures. Cameras in those days weren't cheap, but those who could afford them, when they weren't simply experimenting to see what they could do with the medium, often "experimented" with creating images of the nude female body.
"Many 'art lovers' were interested in the photographic models that depicted naked women," the introduction to Photographia Erotica Historica states. "To this day, purchasing erotic and pornographic photographs for 'academic purposes' is a familiar expression and popular alibi for collectors and consumers. The invention of the wet-collodion process in 1851 enabled numerous prints of a single negative for the first time. This made it affordable for consumers and more profitable for merchants, creating a new storm for these 'objects of desire.' Many photographers barely managed to keep up with producing new images."
But with the invention of the Kodak camera, which used roll film for the first time, mass production of images became even easier, and the existence of nude and sexually explicit photos became widespread, even if they had to be sold underground, and the names of both the photographers and the models kept anonymous.
And now, thanks to Photographia Erotica Historica, many of those early nude and hardcore shots are available to modern readers.
But, cautions this volume's introduction, "Worryingly, this development of tolerance and liberality seems to be reversing, thanks to resurging religious and conservative movements (be they from the left or right). The start of the 21st century also marks the start of the resurgence of censorship. That is why it is our pleasure and task to publish this little book, which is easy to hide in public, as an entertaining reminder of a repressive time in which nudity was still hidden."
Those interested in purchasing Photographia Erotica Historica or checking out the book in more detail can find it here.
