But in the field of male erotic photography, women got a late start. Fortunately, we have the photography of Dianora Niccolini. Dianora's current project is a book of black male nudes but her medical work helped her with the challenge of lighting and photographing the rich tones of black skin as early as this one, from a series done in 1975, well before Mapplethorpe's more famous photos of black men.
Love is just a pair of butt prints in the sand.
Her wry sense of humor is apparent in this work. Then in 1963 she meet Weegee. He inspired her to take up a camera and that led to her becoming a medical photographer, work that she did on and off for twenty years. She found that it tended to be gory and occasionally depressing, but it did give her a mastery of the clear, accurate depiction of the human body. In 1973 she began to use those skills to a happier end, expressing her appreciation of the beauty of the nude figure.