The Nude in Photography.

The Nude in Photography (1975), by Arthur Goldsmith, is a comprehensive large-format survey of nude photography from its earliest origins through the 1970s, beginning its history with the photographer Eugène Durieu, who under the direction of the painter Eugène Delacroix posed some of the earliest nude photographs in Paris in the 1850s. The volume assembles work by more than seventy notable photographers in both black-and-white and color, encompassing figures as historically significant and stylistically diverse as Eadweard Muybridge, Edward Weston, Bill Brandt, Philippe Halsman, Man Ray, and Elliott Erwitt, tracing the medium's evolution across more than a century through Goldsmith's text, which the publisher describes as a lively and illuminating account of the continuing changes in nude photography brought about by the subtly shifting attitudes of the photographer, the model, and the viewer. Published jointly by the Ridge Press and Playboy Press, the volume reflects Playboy's broader publishing ambitions beyond the flagship magazine founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, an enterprise that by the 1970s had expanded into book publishing as a means of asserting cultural and artistic legitimacy for its long-standing engagement with photographic depictions of the human body, situating popular commercial photography within the more serious art historical lineage the volume seeks to document.