'The invention of the camera was to the development of the visual media what the development of the steam engine was to industrialisation.'
Meinrad Maria Grewenig
The second half of the 19th century was marked by smoking factory chimneys, fast growing towns, abrupt social change and political revolutions, brilliant feats of engineering and pioneering inventions. It was at that time that the Völklingen Ironworks came into being. Life in Europe was undergoing more significant changes than ever before. Just as the steam engine could be said to be the herald of a new industrial age involving the mass production of goods, the invention of the camera led to a mountain of pictures. Landscapes, still lives and portraits were created. However, people also used the camera to immortalise their own entirely personal view of the naked body.
'Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!—ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more!' –
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
The business of depicting the naked body has run right through the history of Western art like a leitmotiv. Since the Renaissance, at the latest, the study of the naked body has been an inseparable part of artistic education. In the 19th century, the concept of the 'nude' came into being. The nude study became one of the obligatory exercises at every academy of fine arts. The invention of the camera made it possible for the first time to depict naked bodies 'mechanically'. Through photography, the personal view of the naked body developed into a new pictorial form, and has, since the 19th century, had a determining influence on our contemporary repertoire.
'Soon afterwards, a thousand pairs of eager eyes peered into the apertures of the stereoscope as if they were the skylights of eternity ... '
Charles Baudelaire, French poet and essayist (1821 - 1867)
In 'Nackt – Nu 1850-1900', the World Cultural Heritage Site at the Völklingen Ironworks is exhibiting 120 photos of naked men and women from the Uwe Scheid collection in Saarland, at one time the most important collection of its kind. The spectrum of the nude photography ranges from its beginning around 1850, which was highly orientated on contemporary nude paiting, to an independet form of art at the beginning of the 20th Century.
The delicate pictures have been reprinted for the purposes of the exhibition.
There is a catalogue to go with the exhibition, available at € 9.99.