The Body

The sensual curve of the hip. The disturbing pucker of a scar. The magnetic pull of the lashed eye. In this book, William A. Ewing presents an archive of over 360 photographic images of the body - beautiful, bizarre, sometimes brutally revealing - reflecting many years research and selection in museums, libraries and private collections throughout North America, Europe and Japan. Photography has intensified our obsessive attraction to images of the body for at least 150 years. This book reveals a long tradition of photographing the nude, looking at the many different ways it has been depicted in the photographer's art: the full figure nude; the body in fragments; the body as an object of sexual desire and in the realm of dam, fantasy and obsession. Also included are bodies scrutinised by medical and anatomical photographers, and those celebrated by photographers of sport, dance and fashion. Most of the greatest names in photography are represented here: Nadar, Muybridge and Roger Fenton from the earliest days of the medium; later Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Man Ray; and from our own time John Coplans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara Kruger, Pierre Radisic and many others. Today, in the age of the supermodel and the super-athlete, consciousness of both the private and the public body has never been greater. From 19th-century erotica to the sexual politics of the 1990s, this book in a special slipcased edition provides a rich archive of bodily forms, male and female, and a record of the camera's infatuation with the human figure. William A. Ewing is a renowned authority in the field of photography. His many books include "The Fugitive Gesture" (1987), "Flora Photographica: Masterpieces of Flower Photography" (1991) and "Breaking Bounds: The Dance Photography of Lois Greenfield" (1992) - all published by Thames and Hudson.