The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th Century Britain
By Annebella Pollen.
A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representations
This richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes. Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement’s redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s. Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism’s photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism’s shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power. Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Nudism in a Cold Climate'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Lauren Moya Ford
This fascinating, engaging book demonstrates how British nudists — who later preferred to call themselves naturists — fought for legitimacy in a country not known for warm weather or liberal attitudes.
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Featured spreads are from Nudism in a Cold Climate, releasing this week from Atelier Éditions. Like all of Atelier's books (John Cage: A Mycological Foray,An Illustrated Catalog of American Fruits & Nuts,Sun Seekers, etc.), this 224-page paperback examining the idiosyncratic and rather under-studied phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain is as fascinating as it is beautifully designed. "Photographs are always ambiguous," author Annebella Pollen writes. "They are open to a wide range of readings and counter-readings depending on how they are seen, by whom, and when. Nude and nudist photographs are no different. They may have been produced for artistic, health, educational or sexual purposes, but their categorical certainty was always unstable, and the same models, photographers and photographs crossed the boundaries between these domains. The fluid status of nudes as beautiful and repulsive, normative and liberatory, spiritually uplifting and sexually arousing caused consternation and controversy in the contexts in which they originally circulated. In selecting and presenting images in this book, I acknowledge their original purposes, their alternative adaptations and their continuing potential to be read in multiple ways. The irony is not lost on me that in reproducing nude photographs this book adds to the discourse even as it scrutinizes it. I have chosen illustrations to include nudist and nudist-adjacent imagery across the candid and the romanticized, the elegant and the crude, the professional and the amateur, the earnest and the comic, the common and the unusual.…" continue to blog
Nudism in a Cold Climate The Visual Culture of Naturists in Mid-20th Century Britain
Published by Atelier Éditions. By Annebella Pollen.
A fascinating glimpse into an experimental British nudist culture that radically challenged and transformed conventional attitudes to bodies and their representations
This richly illustrated volume examines the idiosyncratic phenomenon of social nudism in mid-20th-century Britain, an island nation fabled for its lack of sunshine and its reserved social attitudes.
Structured across three interrelated phases, readers first encounter the movement at its genesis in the 1920s, when nudism was synonymous with vegetarianism, intellectualism and utopianism. That nascent culture proliferated in the postwar era, with a widening landscape of amateur clubs and governing organizations alongside high-circulation publications and censorship-challenging photographers. Finally, Annebella Pollen examines the movement’s redefinition as naturism, its cultural battles and its struggle to survive amid shifts in sexual liberation in the permissive 1960s.
Unadorned bodies were the central campaigning tool of British naturism’s photographic propaganda. They drew attention to the cause and drove publication sales but they also attracted regular public opprobrium. Naturism’s shifting visual culture thus provides a microcosmic view of British moral, legal and aesthetic transformations in a period of rapid social change, revealing evolving perspectives on health and sex, gender and ethnicity, pleasure and power.
Annebella Pollen is Reader in History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. Her first book, Mass Photography: Collective Histories of Everyday Life, explored 55,000 amateur snapshots taken on one day in 1987. The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift examined the modernist craft and occult spirituality of former scoutmasters in 1920s England.
