“Song of Myself” has long served as a sort of scripture for me, especially this particular section. I have quoted it many times all over social media. Whenever the demons of doubt cast their shadows on me, Whitman’s lyrical sermons have frequently offered me comfort and inspiration. Whitman viewed both the natural world and the human world with a sense […]
A few years ago, I planned on creating a video called “The Journey of the Fool’s Penis,” which was to be an exploration of the Fool’s Journey through the Jean Noblet Tarot. The video never came to fruition, but the idea—and that particular card—stuck with me. The Jean Noblet Tarot was published around 1650 and is usually considered the first […]
In the early 1880s, the painter Thomas Eakins took numerous photographs of nude models as figure studies for his curriculum at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This collection of photos is commonly known as “The Naked Series.” People of different ages and body types were represented, including Eakins himself and several of his students. Many of the models […]
The invention of photography has given us the ability to take snapshots of real bodies in real time. People have been taking nude photographs since the invention of the daguerreotype in the 1830s. Erotic photos were very clandestine throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, although not as rare as we like to think. Our forebears were doing the same […]