Premiere Nudes brings together photographs by Albert Arthur Allen with an essay by Daile Kaplan. Allen’s nude studies are accompanied by a historical account of his working life. Kaplan’s introduction discusses the legal and financial pressures surrounding that work, as well as his understanding of himself as an artist. Her essay provides a context in which to consider the photographs and the claims Allen made for them.

Allen distinguished between what he considered an incidental nude and a nude image with an artistic purpose. His statement links bodily beauty with a spiritual dimension. Read today, this assertion can become a question for the viewer rather than a settled definition: how does a photograph establish its purpose, and how much does that purpose depend on the photographer’s words? The presence of Kaplan’s essay allows the images and Allen’s self-description to be considered together.

Twin Palms published the hardcover in 2001. The square book measures ten by ten inches and contains 256 pages, with forty four-color plates listed in the publisher’s description. Its physical format gives the photographs a shared setting while retaining the possibility of returning to an individual image. Text and photographs offer different points of entry into the same body of work.

The book invites attention both to nude photography and to the historical circumstances in which it was made and circulated. A reader can consider the distance between an artist’s declared intentions and the meanings an image may acquire for later viewers. Kaplan’s account adds another perspective to that encounter, making the volume a place to examine Allen’s photographs alongside the ideas and pressures associated with his practice.