by ANNEBELLA POLLEN
Naturists believed nudity was profoundly beneficial to society. In order to spread the message, they took to photography
For around 100 years, naturists – formerly known as nudists – have been arguing that public disrobing is physically and morally improving. They first promoted their ideas in illustrated books and magazines in the 1920s and ’30s, and soon extended their claims to the pleasures and practices of viewing nude bodies in photographs. They did this, in Britain, in the face of an incredulous public and a hostile legal system with strict ideas about decency and obscenity.
Can looking at nudes be good for you? The lively debates raised by historical nudists about the pleasures and powers of showing the nude body are fascinating. They provide surprising perspectives on questions about physical beauty, nature, and the sexualised body.
Although we are all born naked and the nude body is as old as humanity, social nudism as a distinct cause and as an organised community has late-19th-century German origins. Philosophers, artists and social reformers sought out anti-urban and anti-industrial alternatives as a way of promoting a more natural and authentic way of life. Their interests in natural health cures through exercise, diet and the purifying exposure of the body to the sun led to a cult of nakedness practised on plots of lands dedicated to group gymnastics and open-air swimming, and promoted through a body of zealous literature in the early years of the 20th century. Some of this thinking about health, youth and the triumphant body beautiful would later inform Nazi literature about national fitness and racial superiority.
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