William Mortensen – The Female Figure: Flesh and Symbol – Laguna Beach School of Photography – 1950s Nude Photo Book

Description

In the mid-20th century, the “how-to” photography manual quietly doubled as a kind of gentleman’s magazine—educational on the surface, erotic just beneath. Ostensibly sold to teach composition, lighting, and print technique, these slim volumes offered a socially acceptable gateway into nude and glamour imagery for the amateur darkroom enthusiast. Mortensen’s The Female Figure sits squarely in that tension: a serious technical book dressed in the language of moral uplift, illustrated with artful nudes rendered in glowing chiaroscuro. Its pages reveal not only a lost world of photographic craft, but also a sly negotiation between desire, aesthetics, and 1950s propriety.

William Mortensen (1897–1965) remains one of American photography’s most polarizing figures—a Hollywood portraitist turned photographic theorist whose elaborate pictorialist methods clashed with the rising purism of Weston and Adams. Teaching from his Laguna Beach studio, Mortensen developed an entire system of image-making rooted in manipulation, control, and artifice. He believed the camera should serve imagination, not merely record truth. The resulting photographs—mythic, sensual, often unsettling—earned him both cult admiration and critical exile. Today, his work is celebrated as a precursor to staged and cinematic photography.

Mortensen blurred the line between manual and manifesto—an art instruction book that became, in hindsight, one of photography’s earliest explorations of beauty, desire, and control.