The aesthetics of the nude form have been painted and modeled since prehistory. So it was no wonder that, when photography became a viable medium in the mid-1800s, one of the first subjects to pose for the infant lens was again the nude.
Many today are suspicious of the nude as serious and legitimate photography.
These suspicions may be due to the proliferation of nude photographs that mostly have little or no esthetic value. Or perhaps it is the underlying doubt that photography cannot quite attain the level of fine art and this somehow lessens even the finest photographs. Whatever the current perception, the nude form in photography began as a serious artistic study by a relatively small number of imaginative photographers. For these artists, this was a practical pursuit since only an expensive professional model could hold a pose for the required time it took to paint. Beyond that, there were some artful poses that even a professional could not long perform but were merely a click away for the camera.