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In
1837, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre perfected camera
obscura photography. But
never mind that.
Shortly
afterwards, an unimaginably daring young woman removed her
clothes in front of the new invention, and triggered one of
those unpredictable avalanches of accident and innovation
to which mankind is fatefully prone. We call it pornography.
 The
first nude photographs were probably formal, "artistic"
daguerreotypes of females in the style of the Olympias
popularized by Baroque and Rococo painters (and later dutifully
mimicked by Playboy and its descendants). However,
as the infant medium of photography passed from scientists
to artists, then on to enthusiasts without aesthetic skills
or ambitions, some ingenious practitioner intuited the camera's
unblinking affinity for the rude vistas of carnality, lugged
the awkward box into the boudoir, and captured the first photographs
intended to depict --and induce-- sexual arousal.
Sadly,
his identity is lost to history, as is that of his first subject,
the spiritual mother of Bettie Page and Chelsea Charms and
all the nude models and porn actresses in between. We will
never know whether she was an artist's model, a moonlighting
prostitute, or simply a woman who obeyed the man behind the
camera. Given the sexual prohibitions of the Victorian era,
however, her decision to pose was tantamount to ritual sacrifice:
she entrusted every shred of her public respectability to
the photographer, and posed for images that were, in that
age, evidence of criminal lewdness.
Imagine,
for a moment, how extraordinary those first pornographic daguerreotypes
must have been. Artists had painted and sculpted sexual images
since the dawn of mankind, but here, tucked into the vest-pocket
of a proper Victorian gentleman, was a thing devoid of artistic
aspiration. Captured with shameless honesty by a trick of
light and chemistry, here was an image of a real woman, a
woman with a name and a family, her bosom exposed and thighs
boldly parted as she reclined on a recently rumpled bed.
Whether
the woman cast her eyes shyly downward or stared defiantly
into the lens, the mere fact of the photograph's existence
testified to a freedom of self normally hidden from all but
a husband or lover, and perhaps even from him. Here was a
document of forbidden desire, crude and silver-brown, to be
taken out and enjoyed in secret, or teasingly revealed to
a gentleman's friends as if sharing the conquest of the woman.
This
first pornographic image was a darkly magical thing, a thing
that recklessly surrendered the woman's secrets to anyone
who saw it, a thing whose power to capture and transmit lust
augured a long future of unrequited obsessions and broken
confidences, a thing that shouted defiance in the library
hush of respectable Victorian society.
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