Over the last year or so I have looking into and researching the financial side of modern art nude photography. After listening to a brilliant podcast series yesterday (details below) by the Financial Times about “who controls porn?”, I finally clicked the pieces together because there’s a lot more similarity between the two worlds than maybe we wish.
In the good ol’ days like the 80’s and 90’s, porn was top shelf material, video tapes, films, sex shop visits and an industry run by those in the industry. For the average person, pictures were the common medium to see this industry. Loud and colorful images adorned teenage bedrooms and a collection of Playboy’s seemed relatively common as the world had gotten used to magazine and TV imagery of sexuality and the growing satellite availability and VHS movies. Camera’s still used film but digital was coming but to view a photo meant seeing it on paper.
‘The first examples of the fine art nude photography were developed not long after the medium was invented in the 19th century. Images often depict the classical and Renaissance arts through their composition and contrast and put the emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of the human body. Many painters (among them Delacroix and Degas) used the camera to capture photos on which they would later base their paintings or drawings and many actual photographers were devoted to the nude. Maybe the first commercial fine art nude photographs are the works of Alfred Stieglitz, who often portrayed his wife Georgia O’Keeffe nude, followed by the iconic Modernist shots by Imogen Cunningham, Man Ray, and Edward Weston, to name a few. The genre evolved further with the arrival of Post-war photographers such as Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, but also Francesca Woodman, Annie Leibovitz, Sally Mann and Robert Mapplethorpe; their nude photos beautifully flirt with other photography genres as well, including portraiture and fashion.’ www.kooness.com/posts/magazine/fine-art-nudes
The internet changed how we view images and photographs in every way. Digital took over and from a small corner store in Ohio, the first chat room as now know them, started. People started sharing images. As long as the images looked consensual then there were no rules. That grew to precedents over digital copyrights and what was deemed appropriate and saw the start of internet commerce and lawsuits over copyright infringement. Porn studios started struggling with the growth of free material and the industry ended up with one guy buying up what was left whilst he started free tube streaming sites. He saw the value in traffic through websites rather than the work produced in the website. Advertising funded the sites which hosted cheaply made porn. This killed the porn industry and changed how we saw images or photographs too. It was getting access to images on the computer that drove buying something over the internet. Porn drove streaming technology and live cams. Yeah, it’s because of porn that buying something online with your Visa or Mastercard and then having a Zoom meeting is possible.
So now photographers of art nude were seeing increasing amounts of similar work online - as well as the proliferation of free porn. What if they wanted to sell something? What happened to porn was happening to the artistic photographers too. As the internet boomed, the amount of images boomed too. Homemade digital uploads changed porn and they changed everyone in the visual arts. It becomes harder to sell admission or prints when home production has made it all so easy. Buy your own camera and start uploading. That is now the entry requirements to doing and producing art nude photography. Hire a model from a model site like Model Mayhem and then post your images on social media. I am not degrading or judging this in any way because it’s just how it works.
Now, in the world of porn, actors learnt to produce work themselves, studios now worked differently and are pretty much controlled by one guy and two credit card companies. Sites like Onlyfans were a result of cam sites like MyFreeCams and homemade has become the money maker. The actors or artists star, produce and make all the money. Well, except for the 20% hosting fee from OF. There are similar sites and they all work off the value of traffic versus content quality. Did you know Onlyfans stated “No pornographic images of any kind” in their content requirements when they first started? When Visa and Mastercard clamped down on OF, they had already done so to porn sites like Pornhub. Yeah, that was caused by a Dad writing an email to a guy at Mastercard saying that Mastercard condoned child (I don’t even want to write that here). Yup, anyway OF was being seen as having mostly porn on their site so that meant it was a “Porn Site” and nobody funds porn. And if Visa and Mastercard started declining payments to any of these online monsters of imagery and video adult entertainment, they would die. Quite simply, if these two companies said no more porn or naked pictures, porn would stop. Everything is online so it would stop; as we know it. Maybe crypto or paypal but without a way to pay instantly means no income which stops the lenders which stops the hosting and then the business.
My point here is that porn has become free and access to nude imagery of all sorts has become free and this has borne a sense of entitlement. People now expect it free or a cheap CC payment maybe for Patreon or a private website. In art nude photography, selling work is not common for most and so being a hobbyist and producing work for social media release is what they do. They do it for the art; or maybe some don’t want to go as far as a massage or a rub’n’tug but a camera and a live naked chick is great! “Call it art on Instagram and I got models messaging me and it’s even sort-of acceptable. Yeah Dude!” I mean whatever you do it for, I don’t care. The more imagery available for free devalues the market of images as a whole. So sites like Model Mayhem and Model Society and so many others capitalized on site traffic and advertising. Sales of artist work is not a big money maker anyway so get lots of images for free and charge advertisers or use a paywall to see them.
So photographers have become content creators. Who are producing content at alarming rates which serves to bolster the hosting sites which serves to boost the incomes of individuals who can profit from selling their image for social media. Hands up you freelance models! Photographers will pay to photograph and post your image on social media. So hosting corporations and companies are making money, models and creators are making money through selling their image or products but art nude photographers are mostly giving their work away for free.
The money is in the traffic not the work. Every photo you post for free makes it harder down the line for another photographer to sell work. Even more so if the model has a lot of available work too. That really depends on the type of work you do also.
So to wrap it up essentially know this. Your work online is commercially dictated just as much as big company porn or sites like Onlyfans are. We are all under the control of Visa and Mastercard. Happy Tuesday!
*Hot Money: Who Rules Porn? | Podcast on Spotify