About the Olympia Project

The Olympia Project is a project centered around the controversial early nude photography that originated in Paris in the 1850s, when new perspectives on sex, taboos, and feminine beauty revolutionized art, fashion and modern society. The Project has a growing collection of photographs from the 1850s to the 1930s.

The Olympia Project also focuses on the relationship between nineteenth-century tinted photography and modern art, and the influence of the newer medium on the work of painters and sculptors at the 19th century.

The 1850’s was a decade of both dramatic technical change and great artistic developments. Many photographers of this period had trained as painters. Photography during the the late 19th century was still very much a handcrafted medium, with technical treatises that provided a basis of knowledge upon which photographers could build. The result was that each photographer’s work had a uniqueness, not unlike the characteristic hand of the artist in painting, and an individuality that is not often associated with later photography.

Programs

The Olympia Project is comprised of three major programs.

The Olympia Project Theatrical Series entails annual theater installations coordinated by videoart.net. The 2016 debut of The Theatrical Series was set in a 19th-century Parisian brothel. The fictional play is inspired by the erotic, stereoscopic tinted photos of the 19th-century French artists Louis-Camille d’Olivier and Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

The Olympia Project Photo Series revisits and recreates vintage photographs that embody the controversial and dynamic beginnings of photography – namely photography focused on prohibited displays of nudity and semi-nudity.

The Olympia Project Collection is a growing archive of vintage photographs from the 1850s to the 1930s which relate to the subject matter of the Beauty, Sex, & Shame program. The Collection is constantly maintained and curated alongside The Olympia Project, progressively expanding in size and reach as rare, vintage photographs and similarly inspired contemporary work are collected.

Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia that is hung in the Salon of Paris in 1865, Olympia’s confrontational gaze caused shock and astonishment when the painting was first exhibited because a number of details in the picture identified her as a prostitute