A guest post by Sosipatra

A couple of years ago I started a blog meant to explore the history of art modelling. I asked a few writers to contribute but then  somehow the blog lost momentum. I cannot manage two blogs simultaneously, that is the bottom line. 
However I am very appreciative of the effort made by these writers and to make amends for the disappearance of the blog I am now republishing those posts here. This one is by Sosipatra whose nom de plume is Appetitive-Soul. 
It is a post exploring a darker history of modelling. 



After the Boxing Day Tsunami, part of the tourist trade that had been centered on Sri Lanka moved to the Andaman Islands, a dependency of India just off the coast of Burma. A few months ago, The Guardian found a scandal tourists' cell phone videos and stills which showed that the Indian soldiers who are supposed to protect the indigenous people of the Jarawa tribe were, for a fee, running tourists through the tribal areas where they would give a few coins or just food to the native girls to dance topless for them. The Guardian described the officers as running a human zoo.

The idea does seem scandalous, but, then, one doesn't have to search the internet very long to find pictures of European women vacationing on the Andamans sunbathing topless or nude, presumably taken by other tourists' cell-phones (and not always with the model's knowledge). Nor is it very difficult anywhere in the West to find a strip club. Then there's the fact that in traditional Jarawa culture, people generally went nude except for a decorative skirt made of leaves that didn’t cover anything very important. So what is so scandalous?

The scandal is Orientalism.

Edward Said's Orientalism argued that the contribution of the Western imagination (as opposed  to Western industrial and military power) to the colonial enterprise of a century ago was to render the colonized peoples as an other, something objectified and possibly commodified, something that had no culture of its own but could serve as a screen for the projection of fantasies. The Orientals created by the West could be noble savages or wily oriental gentlemen, but they certainly weren't like us, even though they couldn’t exist apart from us. They were, in short, just the kinds of things that could be put in zoos, as The Guardian says. Their essential humanity was taken away. Of course, the Oriental could also be made into the object of pity.

There is nothing new going on in the Andaman Islands. The scandals is that it was supposed to have stopped by now. A hundred years ago, there really were human zoos. Indigenous people from around the world were brought to St. Louis in 1904 for the World's Fair and their pens made up one of the most popular attractions as they cavorted with their colorful foreign ways. No doubt they were paid performers in some sense, but they were nevertheless also exhibits.

If you think this is all just an exaggerated manner of speaking, have a look at this postcard:



Tierpark is the regular German word for zoo, literally an animal park.

Orientalism was a popular genre of the European nude postcard industry (stereotypically called French although the cards were produced from Portugal to England) in the first third of the twentieth century.  Many cards were made using European models (who themselves are generally believed to have been prostitutes in Turkish fancy dress). 



But others took advantage of the European colonial empires to objectify real exoticism. There is not much difference between this card and the Andaman cell phone photos:


More interesting are the cards taken in North Africa. These tried to evoke the image of the harem, a fantasy of erotic mystery and subjugation. It is again believed that most of the models would have been prostitutes. Given the strictures of Arab society it is hard to imagine ordinary women posing nude; nor would photographers, who were European, have had ready access to real harems. An image like this reminds us how closeted Arab women were (and in many cases still are).



Of course, this very exclusion could become a source of fetishism.



As distasteful as much of this is, with its exploitation of human beings and especially of women, the paradox is that human creativity can triumph over our baser instincts and create art and beauty out of anything.



Postcards of native women were issued by many publishers and created by many photographers, but the prince among them was Rudolf Franz Lehnert. He was a Wandervögel (a term which can only be translated as hippy), a German middle class youth whose restless dissatisfaction brought him to North Africa which for him became a kind of paradise. He published a huge series of photos, as books and postcards which today are recognized as one of the great artistic achievements of the early days of photography. His partner was Ernst Heinrich Landrock (they may well have been a gay couple), and they did not shy away from gay themes in their work. 



Their main postcard series was called Scenes et types, as if they were part of some ethnographic research project, undercutting the overwhelming erotic content of the work.



Lehnert often worked to use the ostensibly documentary form of photography to create an evocative fantasy drawing on all the tropes of Orientalism, with its model imprisoned by her very erotic identity, a creature from another world as enticing as she was unobtainable.



Lehnert's best work can stand alongside that of the greatest creative artists.







(Images from Sosipatra's personal collection of postcards)


Comments

  1. Of course I and most folks with any awareness of the sex trade know that much of it is fueled by the slave trade--"human trafficking" in more politically correct parlance--but what about modeling? Do you know of any images that I, for example, might have seen whose subject was trafficked?

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  2. Good point but no, not really, though just because I don't know about it it does not mean it cannot happen. I guess it would be more at the porn end of the biz.

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