Anaked woman stands before an artist seated in front of his easel, the elegance of his hat and frock coat, his little Vandyke beard somewhat anachronistic for 1914 (Figure 1). Light molds the back of the woman's body, outlining her outstretched right arm and her bent right leg, accenting her discarded dress draped over the seat of the chair. The shadows, the dark places of her body, echo the partial covering of the representation of nature that hangs like a sign on the screen on the wall behind her. All of the conventions of the artist's studio are here, from the black-and-white tiles to the linking of woman both with nature and pet; but this is a photograph, and it documents without irony certain institutions and practices - a form of representation — that dominated “art” photography at the turn of the century. The tradition upon which this photograph, The Artist and His Model (1914) by Richard Polack, draws, and the ideology to which it subscribes, has to do with notions of power. The light that idealizes, the gaze that possesses, are not always gentle, as Foucault suggests, but sometimes as penetrating as the surgeon's knife. The context for photographs like this one would include Eadweard Muybridge's studies of “the geometry of bodies” of 1887, a series of figures in motion called Animal Locomotion (Figure 2), as well as a whole range of representations of naked human bodies, from what Martha Banta calls the “soft porn” of Clarence White's and Alfred Stieglitz's “genteel ‘art photography’” to E. J. Bellocq's photographs of Storyville prostitutes to anatomical documentary studies for ethnographic, military, and medical purposes.