A few days ago I was reading an interview with an Italian photographer that works male nudes, Gian Orso, and he says:

Quite often I wonder if all the time I spend taking photos, editing them, studying the best poses, undertaking artistic research and finding citations, isn’t simply a game in my head, and that in fact, people really don't care about all that and are only interested in the immediate gratification of seeing nude bodies?

[link] --> go check his website!

That resonates a lot. Sometimes it's hard to draw the line between what makes the artistic nude 'art', from where it is 'nude'.

I believe that art requires the balance of form and content. Oversimplifying the issue, form would be the realm of talent, where content would be the realm of inspiration. Art is achieved when form and content come together through an act of intent. Every work of art has an intention.

I often visit the gallery of artistic nudes of deviantArt, and most of the times I end up disappointed.

When I look at an artistic nude image, my first question is usually about the quality of the form. Is the image properly focused and lit, is the composition interesting, the framing proper.

After that, my second question is about the content. Is there a reason to this? Is there a reason for this nude image to be a nude image? Is there anything new and interesting to this image, anything that has not been overdone, any interesting expressive need?

There are many people doing self portraiture with varying degrees of artistry, from the myspace kinda shots (but nude), to the infamous closeups, to the web cam shot, to the poorly focused and awfully lit... And obviously there are some with good quality as well.

I am certainly guilty of this sin, although I try to treat myself as I would try any other model to go beyond the personal.

Of course we also got our share of good photographers doing studio shots of models. Without generalizing, there are a good number of these photographers that seem to indulge in their own personal (or sexual) preferences for their artwork: heterosexual male photographers shooting only attractive young female models, or gay photographers shooting attractive athletic male models. I seriously distrust this, regardless of the quality of the photography itself. When your main description of the image is "Marta 5", or "Lady in the shower", it just feels that there is nothing to say, no expressive need, just a camera and a model and lighting equipment that happened to meet in the same room.

Taking beautiful photos of a beautiful model, just changing the backdrop, or the make up, or the props, seems to be an easy way of coming up with new and pretty images. But what is artistic about that? At that point the photographer is just another part of the machine, not a creator, and the outcome is more decorative than anything else, better suited for Maxim or Penthouse than gallery material.

Art has to leave aside the gimmicks, the fake ornaments, the easy path, and push boundaries, and bare souls. Art has to transform the subject, the creator and the spectator. Art needs to provoke feelings and thoughts. Because otherwise, why bother, honestly.