Demand for this service first took place in Wuhan in 1987. Madam Liu, a female photographer who then worked at the New Concept Photo Studio in Qingshan District, eventually accommodated her customer’s wishes. In 2000, the number of customers demanding this service increased by 5 percent. Generally speaking, each month five or six girls have reserved time to pose nude.

According to a photographer, customers wanting to pose nude generally have a better educational background, most are from the white-collar class and include company employees and fashion designers. There are also teachers, postgraduates, college students and models, who want to pose nude. A majority of them are between 20 and 25, unmarried or newly-married. Their prime objective, they say, is to have these nude portraits as a souvenir of the beauty of their youthful days.

It is reported that photo studios have made some rules, banning photographers from touching customers, particularly while working.

The rate for posing for a nude portrait is somewhat higher than that for a fully-clothed photo, priced at about 1,500 yuan per set. Generally, each set consists of 33 photos.

Photographers in Wuhan have shown great interest in the new fashion trend.

Among the few female photographers in Wuhan, Madam Liu said young women are always beautiful, and it is of great significance for them to have their own beautiful bodies taken as a memento. As a photographer, Madam Liu declared she is strongly interested in posing the human body since she considers the beauty of the human body a lasting theme of artistic creation. The photographer, she notes, can enjoy the passion of creativity, especially when thinking of the best way to illustrate the beauty of the human body.

After getting approval from the models, the Natural Style Photo Studio hung two nude portraits of the human body in its lobby. Wu Junsheng, a photographer with the photo studio, said he had always tried to expand artistically in a commercial photography operation. Wu believes the development of artistic nude photography certainly is a challenge to his creative talents.

Lan Qing, a member of the Wuhan Photographers’ Association, pointed out that artistic nude photography has developed rapidly in Taiwan, Beijing and Guangzhou, and some models in these cities have also intentionally used their bodies to create some artistic poses in order to guide the photographers. Lan said Wuhan lags behind Beijing and Guangzhou in terms of the artistic level of human body photography, but the city has made relatively rapid progress in terms of its commercial operation.

Lan explained that there are actually a series of clear-cut rules on what poses and what parts of the body can be shown in this style of photography throughout the world. If photo studios can strictly abide by these stipulations and seriously place emphasis on illustrating the beauty of the human form, then artistic nude photography will certainly attract a certain group of people and this will promote the development of the photographic arts. However, since the people involved in the current surge of interest in artistic nude photography are blind to a certain extent, and they have not completely realized the artistry of human body photography, their interest in this trend may be short-lived, Lan said.

(Xinhua 02/08/2001)