1000 Nudes: Uwe Scheid Collection

Commentary on the artistic and social evolution of photographic representations of the human body from 1839 to 1939.
The discovery of photography during the first third of the nineteenth century was the response of the technological era to the taste for images of a middle class of considerable economic means. Indeed, manual graphic techniques such as drawing, etching and lithography must have seemed outmoded to people living in an age when steam machine energy was being pressed into the service of capitalist production, when mechanical looms were gradually replacing the labour force, and when railroads were on the verge of bring distant regions within reach of one another, thus endowing humanity with new mobility. Above all, such manual and therefore largely subjective forms of representation hardly corresponded with the objective vision of the world and the environment to which the rational positivism of the times aspired.