The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France by Raisa Adah Rexer (review)

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• The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France by Raisa Adah Rexer
• Heidi Brevik-Zender

Raisa Adah Rexer, The Fallen Veil: A Literary and Cultural History of the Photographic Nude in Nineteenth-Century France. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021, 328 pp.

Raisa Adah Rexer’s outstanding book is an engaging and well-argued study of nude photography and its effects on French literature and culture during the mid- to late 1800s. Drawing on an array of archival sources and grounded in feminist photography scholarship, Rexer provides a valuable genealogy of the nude photograph in art and popular culture while offering compelling new readings of literary works by authors including Charles Baudelaire, the Gon-court brothers, and Emile Zola. The book is extensively illustrated with period photographs, some of which are extremely explicit in showing women’s bodies in sexually suggestive poses. Acknowledging the potentially shocking and problematic elements of these materials, Rexer examines them with sensitivity and respect.

A brief Preface helpfully defines the author’s use of key terms, including “pornography” and “obscenity,” and outlines the overall study. Each of the book’s two parts begins with a historical chapter. The first covers the artistic and legal status of nude photography during the medium’s emergence in the Second Empire (Chapter 1) and the second (Chapter 5) charts the evolution of these conditions in the Third-Republic age of mass production.

Chapter 1 builds around a discussion of the académie, a photograph of a (typically female) nude figure that could be legally produced and used by artists in their work. Even in its early decades, however, nude photography began pushing the limits of censorship laws and came increasingly to influence and challenge how the art world and public print culture could represent and view images of unclothed female bodies. In Chapter 2, Rexer delves into the registers of the Archives de la Préfecture de police to expose period anxieties over assumed connections between nude photography and prostitution. Women [End Page 217] sitting unclothed before the camera as part of a growing unauthorized market for these images were equated with myriad dangerous behaviors associated with sex work. Police arrest records reveal systematic attempts to control this “threat”—as well as the female body—through legal prosecution of models.

Chapter 3, “Baudelaire’s Bodies,” succeeds admirably in the difficult task of crafting a new approach to the poet’s well-studied works. Considering such poems as “Une Charogne” and “Une Martyre” alongside Salon essays and Le peintre de la vie moderne, Rexer makes a convincing case for the influence of nude photography on Baudelaire’s troubling representations of female figures (splay-legged, violently exposed), tracing these images in his writings to poses and gestures commonly found in nude photographs. Skillful close readings showcase Rexer’s polish as a literary critic as she nuances, but does not absolve Baudelaire, of the misogynist attitude with which these works have been associated.

Chapter 4 builds on what Rexer views as a Baudelairian intertext in the Goncourt brothers’ novel Manette Salomon. For the Goncourts, photography’s realism exposed fundamental aesthetic concerns—in the age of photographic reproduction, “What is the artist? What is art? And where do they exist in relation to reality?” (114)—informing their retreat into “anti-modernity” as a response.

Chapter 5, the book’s second historical overview, turns to the last three decades of the 19th century, when censorship laws were redefined and nude photography, like photography more generally, became industrialized and proliferated in a variety of print formats. Nude photographs were still used in service of art, but with increased appearances in commercial formats such as mass-produced postcards, even those in the art world grew reluctant to defend the artistic merits of images that were more frequently associated with erotica for purchase than with aesthetic ideals.

As nude photography lost its artistic credibility, Chapter 6 shows, it became further linked to prostitution and pornography, both connected to the street as a space for buying and selling these “dangers” to society. Although it is not the main focus of the chapter, Rexer touches intriguingly on the notion that...