Men Undressed
For centuries, artists—and more recently, photographers—have drawn a distinction between two different approaches to depicting the human form. On the one hand, a 'portrait' is a representation of a particular individual, designed (as Roland Barthes observed) to evoke in the viewer the intuitive response that this is the one that they have known. On the other, a 'nude' draws on the conventions and fashions of the era to present an aesthetic or erotic ideal: one in which the personality and idiosyncrasies of...
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