The Visual Arts Club
In 1951 a photographer named Jean Straker turned his studio at 12 Soho Square into a members’ club. He called it the Visual Arts Club, and its stated purpose included lectures and demonstrations and, more to the point, the provision of nude models for amateur photographers. The men who came to look without photographing were given a title. Straker called them “appraisers”. Members’ wives became members automatically.
It is hard to read those details without smiling, and I do not think we are obliged to resist. The appraisers, in particular, have the air of a joke that nobody present was allowed to make: the man who has come to Soho to look at a naked woman is not a voyeur but an appraiser, a connoisseur of form, a figure from the auction room. The wives, admitted by default, are a different kind of joke, a sort of pre-emptive alibi, as if the club’s constitution had been drafted with one eye on the magistrate. But Straker was not a cynic, or not only one. He took some ten thousand nude photographs over his career, fought the censors with genuine conviction, and was raided by police in 1961, who seized nearly two thousand display cards and negatives. He was convicted and fined £150 the following year and prosecuted again in 1965 for selling unretouched nudes by mail order. The historian Annebella Pollen, who has done more than anyone to rescue him from obscurity, points out that nudist magazines of the period were obliged to paint out pubic hair, and that Straker’s refusal to do so was the heart of his quarrel with the law. He wanted to show the body as it was. The law wanted it airbrushed into a shop mannequin.
The Visual Arts Club is a good place to start because it shows, in miniature, the problem at the centre of this history. It is not a problem of aesthetics or morality, though both are involved. It is a problem of logistics. For amateur nude photography to happen, four things must be brought together: a body willing to be photographed, a camera and someone who wants to use it, a space in which to do so, and a set of shared expectations that tell everyone what is going on. None of these things occurs naturally in the same place. Someone has to arrange it. The history of the scene is, among other things, a history of successive answers to the question of how to arrange it.
from Shooting: An Ethnography of Britain’s Amateur Nude-Modelling Scene (2026)
