Professing what’s popular: New audiences for Annebella Pollen’s 'Nudism in a Cold Climate'

Bella’s work has delighted audiences for years and is regularly featured on radio and TV. Her ‘vinegar valentines’ research into Victorian anti-love-tokens provided questions for the BBC’s QI, was featured as 'Eight incredibly offensive Victorian Valentines' on Radio 4, and receives annual international press coverage. Her investigations of amateur photography have shed light on the packaging of photographic prints and the enduring appeal of sunsets as subjects. A specialism in early twentieth-century utopias produced an award-winning book and exhibition on artistic alternatives to scouting. Now she has turned her expert analytical gaze to the subject of British nudity.

Nudism in a Cold Climate: The visual culture of naturists in mid-twentieth century Britain was published in 2021 and examines the decades between the 1920s and the 1970s when naturist photography danced cheek-to-cheek with the evolving censorship laws in Britain. Bella recently presented highlight thoughts on the work at the ever-popular Brains at the Bevy event at The Bevy pub in Bevendean, Brighton. With a podcast newly created from the 'Naked and Unashamed' talk, this short introduction to the history of naturist publications is bound to bring new fans to her work.

Bella explores the tensions around the ways people have sought to interpret and promote nakedness in photographs and in print. She laughs at a British Library copy of Nudism in England (1933) in which a disgruntled borrower had scrawled “No pictures!”. It’s a serious and important study, though. As she says, “The nude body and its visual depiction have always attracted attention and generated heated debate. What and who should be seen and shown, by whom and where, form the basis of the social and moral codes that shape behaviour and belief.”

The history that Bella takes us through encompasses the growth of popular photographic printing, the solemnity with which early naturists championed their beliefs, and the questionable motives of photographers at a time when print and publication became cheaper and easier, and post-war freedom was creating new markets and challenging censorship. 

Professor Pollen's book required a 'modesty flap' to permit use of the cover image on contemporary platforms such as Amazon and Twitter, despite the featured photograph passing censorship laws in 1951.

Health and Efficiency, the National Magazine of Health, 1925.

Bella’s discussion considers the ‘cold climate’, both of temperature and temperament, that the hardy Brits of the early and mid-twentieth century had to brave. We learn that the early ‘Gymnosophists’ in the 1920s were publishing their beliefs under the rallying cry “our clothes lie behind us,” keen for others to understand that taking clothes off socially “offered physical moral and spiritual comfort to all.” Countercultural expressions by free thinkers and health enthusiasts encountered hostilities from a public for whom even sunbathing was a new and subversive practice.

Early magazines insisted that nudism was wholly separate from sex, emphasising the “profound healing powers” of nudism in publications such as the 1933 journal Gymnos, subtitled “for nudists who think.” However, readers, Bella notes, were bringing different perspectives, and the response by magazines was greater emphasis on posed female model bodies. The intention was (at least in part) the promotion of values of youth and health and the ideal body. Yet fitness, ideals and bodies selected for viewing were informed by eugenic thinking. What emerged were increasingly large numbers of pages where images of slim young white women accompanied every text no matter what aspect of health and well-being were under discussion – warts, body-odour and all.

There were unsurprisingly many more readers of naturist magazines than practising naturists. Bella takes us through the clash of cultures as ambitious photographers piggy-backed the naturist agenda in a battle for greater freedoms. The obscenity laws insisted that genitals and pubic hair were not shown, and in a crusade for full appreciation of “perfect womanhood”, photographers like Roye developed campaigns to test the limits of the censor. Notably the model bodies he selected were professional showgirls rather than stalwart gymnosophists, and so nude models illustrated a movement in which they played no meaningful part.

The fight against the censor was largely a fight by men for the right to see the unadulterated bodies of young women. Bella closes her book at the point where the floodgates were opened to a tide of 1970s pornography and the excuse of naturism became unnecessary.

Interest in Bella’s work on naturism has included a review feature in the French newspaper, La Libération, which picked up on nudism’s relationship to national identity. For the French journalist, says Bella, “it was clearly curious, if not comical, that their neighbours across the channel, in a country known for grey skies and persistent rain, might seek the sun in its national borders, against all odds.”

Paris-based film director David Caillon saw this article and, as the editor-in-chief of a documentary series of shorts entitled 'Gymnastique: La Culture sans Claquage', he and Bella set out to make a short film that captured the history of nudism, its visual culture, and its shifting status in twentieth-century Britain. David was interested in the way that photography and film had long been used as promotional tools to recruit audiences (if not always participants) for nudist cultures.

John Everard, untitled [from a series of four photographs of nude woman drinking tea], 'Artist's Model' (London: Bodley Head, 1951).

The film, Le Nudisme à la Britannique, was released by Arte TV in February 2024 in French and German, with five other language versions to follow.

Filming at the White House in Surrey, a naturist club established in 1933, Bella was able to visit locations that were photographed by Bertram Park and Yvonne Gregory in the 1930s and had been included as illustrations in her book. The resulting film, Le Nudisme à la Britannique, was released by Arte TV in February 2024 in French, with five other language versions to follow. As with Bella’s book, it tells the story of nudism through a British frame, but it does so from a French perspective: cups of tea, pictures of the Queen, and liveried butlers feature as much as bare bodies. A century is covered in six tight minutes. Historic still photographs are animated in lively ways, between vintage footage from previous documentaries shot in naturist clubs in the 1950s and the more spurious nude cinema offerings of the 1960s. “The final edit,” says Bella, “has a touch of Carry On Camping (1969) – a British comedy that famously begins with a cinema screening of a 1958 naturist documentary - mixed with elements of the 1990s Channel 4 culture show, Eurotrash.”

These bids to bring academia into the public consciousness - short, comic homages on screen and podcasts recorded in local pubs – are the vital lifeblood of university academic work. This is how ideas can reach and influence audiences. The good humour and popular appeal are a bridge into the moving stories and important understandings that are uncovered by academic analysis.

Bella makes sure she also reinforces the wider importance that comes with understanding how countercultures made statements through visual methods: “Naturism – or nudism, as it was known in its earliest days - has produced a striking body of photographs promoting physical health and mental freedom. From Greek-style heroes to pouting pin-ups, naturist nudes in mid-20th century Britain appeared in newsstands and law courts alike. They attracted admiration and ridicule, but they also challenged British norms and laws.” 

Professor Annebella Pollen

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Professor Annebella Pollen's latest publication is also available: Art without Frontiers: The Story of the British Council, Visual Arts, and a Changing World (Art Books Publishing / British Council, January 2024).

In this research she asks whether the meaning of a work of art changes as it crosses a border from one place to another. Can art exhibitions play a role in the relations between different nations? How does a national collection of art reflect a country’s sense of itself, and even shape its standing in the world?

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Staff related to this story

Professor Annebella Pollen

Prof in Visual and Material Culture – School of Humanities and Social Science

Understanding childhood and adolescence Research Excellence Group, Photography Research Excellence Group, Centre for Design History