Erotic photography is a style of art photography of an erotic , sexually suggestive or sexually provocative nature. It is a type of erotic art. In a spectrum, erotic photography is often distinguished from nude photography , which contains nude subjects not necessarily in erotic situations, and pornographic photography, which is of a sexually detailed nature. Pornographic photography generally moves in the direction of the " obscene ", and is judged as lacking in artistic or aesthetic value; however, the line between art and pornography has been both socially and legally debated, [ 1 ] and many photographers have created work that intentionally ignores these distinctions.
Erotic photographs are normally intended for commercial use, including mass-produced items such as decorative calendars , pinups and for men's magazines , such as Penthouse and Playboy , but many art photographers have also dabbled in detailed or erotic imagery. Glamour photography is frequently erotic. The subjects of erotic photographs include professional models, celebrities and amateurs. Well-known entertainers do not generally pose nude for photographs. The first entertainer to pose nude for photographs was the stage actress Adah Isaacs Menken β The majority of erotic photographs are of female subjects, but erotic images of men are also published.
Before , depictions of nudity and erotica generally consisted of paintings, drawings and engravings. In that year, Louis Daguerre presented the first practical process of photography to the French Academy of Sciences. Artists adopted the new technology as a new way to depict the nude form, which in practice was the feminine form. In so doing, at least initially, they tried to follow the styles and traditions of the art form. Each had to be registered with the French government and approved or they could not be sold.
However, the realism of a photograph as opposed to the idealism of a painting made many of these intrinsically erotic. In Nude Photography, β , Peter Marshall notes: "In the prevailing moral climate at the time of the invention of photography, the only officially sanctioned photography of the body was for the production of artist's studies. Many of the surviving examples of daguerreotypes are clearly not in this genre but have a sensuality that clearly implies they were designed as erotic or pornographic images".
The daguerreotypes were not without drawbacks, however. The main difficulty was that they could only be reproduced by photographing the original picture since each image was an original and the all-metal process does not use negatives. In addition, the earliest daguerreotypes had exposure times ranging from three to fifteen minutes, making them somewhat impractical for portraiture.
