There is a gesture in the history of photography more vertiginous than any other: turning the camera on oneself, and undressing in front of it. The nude self-portrait is neither a minor genre nor a simple biographical curiosity. It is an act in which the photographer stops being merely the author and becomes the subject, the object, and sometimes the casualty of their own image. This feature holds strictly to that precise gesture: photographing oneself, nude or undressed, rather than being photographed nude by someone else, or photographing another person’s nudity. It traces this thread photographer by photographer, asking the same question each time: what did this gesture actually do to their career? Did it launch it, break it, delay recognition by decades, or change nothing at all?
Raoul Hausmann, the body as material for Dadaist revolt
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), one of the pillars of Berlin Dada, nicknamed “Der Dadasophe,” is among the very first photographers to have left genuine, deliberate nude self-portraits. In 1931 he photographed himself completely nude, standing, back against a pillar, arm raised. Two variants of the pose survive, now held at the Centre Pompidou. The year before, on the island of Sylt, he had made a series of nudes with his partner Vera Broïdo, in which his own body also appears. These images owe nothing to academic nude painting. They are frontal, almost clinical, much like a man who had otherwise built his reputation on photomontage and the deliberate dismantling of self-image (his famous clothed self-portrait ABCD, 1923-1924, face glued into the frame with the first four letters of the alphabet clenched between his teeth, is its exact counterpart). On the career front, this nude produced no measurable effect at the time. Hausmann never exhibited or circulated these images. They remained in his personal archives and were only shown publicly, notably at the Centre Pompidou, decades later, as a secondary chapter of a body of work first known for photomontage. The nude self-portrait neither hurt nor helped Hausmann. It simply stayed invisible during his lifetime.
Arno Rafael Minkkinen, fifty years of nudity without a single false note
The case of Arno Rafael Minkkinen (born 1945, Finnish-American) is arguably the most singular in this feature, simply by virtue of its duration. Since 1969-1971, without interruption, he has photographed his own nude body merging into landscape: cliffs, forests, lakes, snow, unmanipulated, in a single exposure, the shutter triggered remotely on a nine-second delay. He began this practice in a workshop with John Benson, partly inspired by the work of Diane Arbus, before earning his degree at the Rhode Island School of Design under Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind. That makes him earlier than Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, whose work is often credited with the genre’s emergence in the mid-1970s. Minkkinen deliberately avoids any erotic or exhibitionist reading of his work. “I don’t want to be seen as a nudist,” he explains, describing instead a near-spiritual experience of fusing with the living world. He also refuses to hand the role to a male model who might stand in for him: some poses, he says, are too dangerous to expose anyone other than himself to. This body of work has never triggered the slightest scandal across fifty years of continuous production, unlike Mapplethorpe or Cox. It has instead earned Minkkinen a teaching career (University of Massachusetts Lowell, Aalto University in Helsinki), more than a hundred solo exhibitions, eight monographs, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015 at age 70, and a now uncontested place in the history of the genre. Proof, as with Coplans, that a constant, frontal nude can be absorbed by institutions without friction once it escapes any explicit sexual or political reading.
Francesca Woodman, an entire body of work built on the nude of the self, recognized only after death
Between her teenage years and her death by suicide at 22 in 1981, Francesca Woodman (1958-1981) produced more than 10,000 negatives and 800 prints, the vast majority of them nude self-portraits, made in dilapidated interiors, her body blurred by long exposures. A student at the Rhode Island School of Design, she tirelessly sent this work to fashion magazines that ignored her, was turned down for a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and sank into a depression that led to her death. At the time of her death, this body of nude self-portraits had produced no recognition whatsoever, neither scandal nor interest. It is almost the inverse of Mapplethorpe’s case: where scandal was immediate and political, here indifference was total and the reversal entirely posthumous. Since then, Woodman has become an almost obligatory reference in any discussion of the female self-portrait and the nude body in photography, an acclaim she never knew and whose interpretation historians still dispute: did her melancholy nudes foreshadow her end, or is that an abusive retrospective reading imposed after the fact by knowledge of her suicide?
Peter Hujar, total exposure with no recognition in his lifetime
In the New York underground of the 1970s and 1980s, Peter Hujar (1934-1987) turned the nude self-portrait into an exercise in almost unbearable honesty. His Nude Self-Portrait Series, begun in the late 1960s during a master class taught by Richard Avedon, which Diane Arbus also attended, continued through the Self Portrait in the Baths (1976-1979), shot in Manhattan’s gay bathhouses, before culminating in 1980 with Seated Self-Portrait Depressed, in which he appears fully nude, slumped in a chair, in a state of vulnerability so direct that the image continues to haunt anyone who encounters it. The actor Ben Whishaw owns a print, and it is this image that inspired the film Peter Hujar’s Day (2025). In his lifetime, this total exposure produced strictly no effect on Hujar’s career. He died of AIDS in 1987, poor, barely exhibited, without any of these self-portraits having drawn the slightest public notice. It was only after his death, with the Morgan Library exhibition in 2018 and then Hujar: Contact in 2026, that his work, nude self-portraits included, was rediscovered and recognized as foundational for two generations of New York photographers, Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin chief among them. Goldin has said she would never have become a photographer without him.
Robert Mapplethorpe, the self-portrait that triggered a culture war
No case in this feature illustrates the direct impact of a nude self-portrait on a career better than Robert Mapplethorpe’s (1946-1989). In 1978 he made Self Portrait, an image showing him from behind, bent forward, wearing black vinyl, the handle of a braided leather bullwhip inserted into his anus, his gaze turned toward the lens. The image was part of the X Portfolio, one of three portfolios, X, Y, Z, that he considered the complete representation of his work: gay S&M practices, floral still lifes, classical nudes of Black men. The bullwhip self-portrait was first shown without incident in Philadelphia and Chicago. It was only in 1989, during the posthumous tour of the retrospective The Perfect Moment (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in March 1989, months before the controversy erupted), that the image became the epicenter of one of the greatest postwar American culture wars. The Corcoran Gallery in Washington canceled the exhibition under pressure, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati faced obscenity prosecution, and Senator Jesse Helms and his allies used this exact photograph to try to cut public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. A self-portrait taken a decade earlier within a gay subculture context thus became, against the artist’s will, the central rhetorical weapon of a political offensive against contemporary art as a whole, with the artist, now dead, unable to respond. The irony of Mapplethorpe’s trajectory is total: this same image made him both a symbol of censorship and one of the most commercially valuable photographers of his generation, his prices having climbed ever since. His very last self-portrait, made in 1988, a year before his death, breaks radically with this imagery: an emaciated face floating in darkness, a hand clenched around a cane topped with a skull. Aestheticized provocation gives way to a bare, unflinching memento mori.
John Coplans, the nude self-portrait as a second career, without a single scandal
John Coplans’s (1920-2003) path is the exact counterpoint to Woodman’s. Founding editor of Artforum, museum director, respected critic for twenty years, Coplans abandoned that career in 1980-1981 to become a photographer in his sixties. From 1984 onward, he set about methodically photographing his own aging nude body, never his face, often fragmented into close-ups of feet, hands, back, torso, reassembled into diptychs. His first solo exhibition at the Pace/MacGill gallery in 1986 was followed by swift and sustained institutional recognition: SFMoMA in 1988, MoMA the same year, the Whitney, a retrospective at MoMA PS1 in 1997, and the title of Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres awarded by the French government in 2001. No scandal ever surrounded this nude, aging body, shown without indulgence or eroticism. Coplans is the clearest example in this collection of a career entirely relaunched, rather than threatened, by the late nude self-portrait, including commercially, since his prints have since entered the collections of more than seventy museums.
Ana Mendieta, the body that disappears, a reception hijacked by her death
Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) stretches the definition of the genre to its limit. Her Siluetas series (1973-1980), more than 200 works made in Cuba, Mexico, and Iowa, consists of pressing the silhouette of her own nude body into the landscape, burned earth, sand, flowers, mud, fire, before letting the elements erase it. The photograph is then only the final trace of an ephemeral gesture, to the point that some art historians hesitate to call these “self-portraits” in the strict sense, since the body literally vanishes from the image in favor of its imprint. The Siluetas established Mendieta, from the 1970s onward, as a leading figure of body art and land art. But her death in 1985, a fall from the 34th floor of her New York apartment under circumstances that led to the trial of her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre, acquitted in 1988 at the end of a trial in which both prosecution and defense weaponized her own work (the repeated use of her body and motifs of death was presented as evidence of suicidal tendencies) to construct competing narratives about her state of mind, has for decades hijacked the reading of her work in favor of the story of her death. A critical reassessment of her work on its own terms, independent of that tragedy, remains a largely unfinished project forty years later.
Elina Brotherus, the nude as a dialogue with the history of painting
Elina Brotherus (born 1972, Finland), who moved from a master’s degree in analytical chemistry into photography, has established herself since the late 1990s as one of the central figures of the Finnish “Helsinki School.” Her early self-portraits, often nude, document highly personal inner states. From 2000 onward, with the series The New Painting, she reoriented her work toward an explicit dialogue with the history of painting, Caspar David Friedrich and German Romanticism in particular, staging herself nude or undressed against landscapes, in direct reference to the contemplative figures of nineteenth-century painting. She has summed up the project this way: approaching, with a camera, the same questions painters have grappled with for centuries (light, color, composition, the figure in space) while simultaneously occupying the roles of author and model, painter and painted subject. The critic W.A. Ewing has noted that her nudes are “not really nudes” in the classical sense, but confessions of vulnerability rather than images meant to excite the gaze, a reading borne out by the discomfort her images sometimes provoke in unprepared viewers, without this ever leading to public controversy. Like Minkkinen and Coplans, Brotherus has built a steady, upward trajectory over more than twenty-five years: international exhibitions since 1997, the Fotofinlandia Prize in 2000, works in the collections of major European museums, without any scandal ever touching a body of work built almost entirely on her own nudity.
Sandra Mjöll Jónsdóttir, the body staged to say what words cannot
Less internationally documented than the other figures in this feature, Sandra Mjöll Jónsdóttir, an Icelandic photographer based on the east coast of the country, holds a Master’s degree in photography from the University of the Arts London (2008) following an earlier fine art degree from the Iceland Academy of the Arts, and has practiced staged photography since the mid-2000s, part of it in the form of self-portraits, sometimes nude. She explains her own choice to consistently use herself as model as a matter of control: “the reason I use myself as a model is that I know precisely what I want to show,” body language, non-verbal communication, images which, in her words, stage emotions familiar to most people and invite the viewer to question their own self-image. Her work, regularly shown solo since 2003 in Icelandic cultural venues (Skaftfell, Skriðuklaustur, the technical museum of Seyðisfjörður) and in group exhibitions internationally, including Bucharest Photofest in 2023 (where we met, as we had both been invited to exhibit our photowork), fits less into a logic of provocation or manifesto than into a more intimate one: self-staging as a narrative tool. When nudity appears, it serves the story of an inner state rather than a frontal statement on gender, race, or sexuality, unlike the more politically charged cases in this feature.
Zanele Muholi, partial nudity as contemporary political act
Closer to the present, Zanele Muholi (born 1972, South Africa) has made the self-portrait a tool of visual activism with the series Somnyama Ngonyama (“Hail the Dark Lioness,” ongoing since 2012): several hundred images in which the artist, often bare-chested, stages themselves with everyday objects repurposed as accessories, scouring pads, rubber gloves, tires, the contrast pushed to an extreme to heighten the darkness of the skin. A gesture the artist describes as reclaiming ownership of their own representation. Unlike Mapplethorpe or Cox, this work has triggered no comparable scandal. It has instead carried Muholi toward rapid, international institutional recognition, exhibitions at Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim, and the rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, with the partial nudity received less as erotic provocation than as an explicit political gesture on the representation of the Black, queer body.
Renée Cox, the nude as deliberate political provocation, a double-edged weapon
Renée Cox (born 1960, a Jamaican-American artist) is the most direct case in this feature when it comes to the link between the nude self-portrait and public scandal. In 1993, pregnant, she made Yo Mama, a large-format nude self-portrait shown at the New Museum’s Bad Girls exhibition. She was, at the time, the first pregnant woman shown in that context. But it was Yo Mama’s Last Supper (1996) that ignited the real controversy: a five-panel photomontage in which Cox, fully nude, arms raised, takes the role of Christ in a restaging of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, surrounded by eleven Black disciples and one white Judas. Shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2001, the work was called “disgusting,” “outrageous,” and “anti-Catholic” by New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who called for a “decency panel” to oversee art shown in any city-funded museum. Cox’s response to the press: “Get over it.” As with Mapplethorpe, the scandal was both a risk and an accelerant. Giuliani’s attack gave the work a level of media exposure it would never have achieved otherwise, cementing Cox’s reputation as a figure of Black feminism in contemporary art, even as the controversy also permanently fixed her work, in the public mind, to that single image.
What these trajectories share, and what sets them apart
Looking at these eleven careers side by side, no simple rule emerges. The nude self-portrait did not systematically cause scandal. Hausmann and Hujar provoked no public reaction whatsoever in their lifetimes, good or bad, because this work stayed private, invisible, unshown. For them, the “career consequence” was, in reality, an absence of consequence for decades, followed by an entirely institutional, posthumous rediscovery. Mapplethorpe and Cox, by contrast, experienced the most brutal and immediate effect: in both cases, a political authority, a senator, a mayor, seized on a nude self-portrait to turn it into a weapon of mobilization, with the paradoxical result of multiplying the work’s fame rather than suppressing it. Coplans, Minkkinen, and Brotherus, by further contrast, each experienced a steady, frictionless upward trajectory, proof that the nude self-portrait is not doomed to shock. Their cases show that a frontal, sustained nude, stripped of any explicit erotic or political intent, can be absorbed by institutions without friction, often on the condition that it is framed by a formal discourse (landscape, painting, the aging body) that shifts the reading away from the strictly sexual register. Woodman and Mendieta share the bitterest fate of all: their early deaths overtook the reading of their work for years, each reduced, for a time, to a symptom of her own end rather than to a body of work. Jónsdóttir, finally, is a reminder that on the scale of a career still underway and still regional, the nude self-portrait can also remain what it has been for many before any public exposure: a tool for intimate storytelling, with no ambition toward manifesto or scandal, whose narrative function outweighs any sexual or political reading.
Grégory Herpe
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