No one was more surprised than Mirabella's Gay Bryant when the magazine she edited was banned in Boise-as well as in supermarkets and drugstores in Cincinnati, Denver and across the American heartland. Retailers were upset by the November 1994 issue's excerpt from William Ewing's The Body, a stocking-stuffer filled with more than 360 images of the human form. Bryant believes that it was the 1991 Sally Mann photograph of a nude child reproduced in the magazine that raised hackles. The now-infamous photographer's luminous pictures of her own kids in the buff have long elicited (apparently groundless) intimations of exploitation and child abuse. Ewing's introductory text in Mirabella proved oddly prescient. "All photographs of the body are potentially 'political,'" he wrote, "inasmuch as they are used to sway our opinions or influence our actions."

Anybody who's even casually followed the news of the '90s may be experiencing a sense of dÈjý vu. Allegations of indecency, child pornography and blasphemy have typified the so-called culture wars that have turned Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano into household names. But even the most cursory glance at the 150-year history of photography reveals that nudity, eroticism and underground subcultures have long been the favored subjects of literally hundreds of often celebrated picture makers. F. Holland Day, for instance, a turn-of-the-century Pictorialist photographer, specialized in homoerotic male nudes and views of himself as the crucified Jesus. Although some commentators at the time questioned the propriety of Day's dandified portrayal of this sacred scene-he starved himself and let his hair grow for the occasion-response was restrained by today's standards. Other photographers made even more potentially inflammatory pictures. Why is it that so few of them, until recently, kicked up genuinely public controversy? As Maria Morris Hambourg, photography curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, observes, "Nobody broke the code about exhibiting or publishing them." In other words, limitations on distribution, rather than on production, often kept the images from reaching-and offending-a wide public.

It's easy to forget that photography wasn't always considered art and that plenty of it will, in fact, remain non-art. Many scientific and photojournalistic images fall into this latter category. One famous censored photograph of American war dead in the South Pacific-George Strock's image for Life of three soldiers on Buna Beach-reminds us that the horrific as well as the sexual may disturb. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential studies of the human figure in motion, often nude, began life in the 19th century as scientific investigation and only recently assumed the status of art. These serial photographs are so clinical-looking that it's difficult to imagine anyone objecting to them. But another scientific image that goes on view in a show at the Metropolitan Museum next month, by the documentarian and portraitist Nadar, may shock many viewers ("Nadar," April 14 through July 9). This 1860 picture of a hermaphrodite portrays "her"-she passed for a woman in society-with legs spread and face covered by her hand to avoid recognition. "He purportedly shot it for science," Hambourg notes. "But it couldn't even have been published in a medical text." It also couples the sexual and the horrific in a single, riveting picture.

When Nadar made this image, photography was barely two decades old. The public initially regarded the new medium as a scientific aid or, as one of its inventors put it, the "pencil of nature," rather than as art. Art entered the picture no more than four years after photography's 1839 invention, with John Edwin Jabez Mayall's daguerreotypes interpreting the Lord's Prayer. Late 19th-century pronouncements of photography's destiny as an art medium were as frequent as admiring evaluations of iron-and-glass railway stations. The English critic C. Jabez Hughes's 1861 comment can stand for dozens of similar appeals: "Hitherto photography has been principally content with representing Truth. Can its sphere not be enlarged? And may it not aspire to delineate Beauty, too?"

It could and would. Victorian notions of beauty in art, however, were quite different from our own. Embodied in precisely the sort of academic painting and sculpture that modern taste has rejected, Victorian thinking venerated the ideal over the real, and the nude over the merely naked. Academic painters like Adolphe William Bouguereau and Alexandre Cabanel paid lip service to the didactic morality of classical or biblical tales while foregrounding titillating depictions of nude saints and senators. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's tremendously popular, but indisputably kitschy, depictions of ancient baths helped inspire the steamy epic films of Cecil B. DeMille.

Such art also encouraged Pictorial photographers. In the hands of an international roster of Pictorialists-including Peter Henry Emerson, Gertrude K”sebier and Edward Steichen-the medium's characteristically sharp focus gave way to images that looked like paintings. The Pictorialists photographed their subjects in soft focus or blurred their pictures through gum or platinum printing. Many photographers also borrowed the attention-getting, classicizing nudity of late-Victorian art. Clarence H. White's dramatically composed image of an alabaster-skinned female nude reflected in a round basin of water perfectly suited the conventions of the day. The model's shaved pubic hair emulates classical statuary; the artifice of the composition certifies the image as art. As Holland Day asserted, Pictorialist images had to appear as if they had been made, rather than simply taken by "every school girl and school boy [who] has a Kodak."

The mantle of art not only imparted respectability to overheated imagery, but it also provided cover for photographers evoking less socially approved conduct. By 1850, the first law prohibiting the sale of obscene photographs had already been passed in France. Painters and photographers of the female nude were allowed far more latitude than those depicting the male. The photographer of the male nude par excellence during the medium's first century was Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, a Prussian nobleman residing in Sicily.

Von Gloeden portrayed nude adolescents, often with lyres or other classical props, against spectacular backdrops of the Mediterranean. His solemn subjects assumed contrapposto poses and gestured mysteriously. Although von Gloeden's pictures participated in the fin-de-siËcle mania for ancient Greece that led to the resumption of the Olympic Games and the Grecian dances of Isadora Duncan, they appealed largely to a homosexual audience. To evade prohibitions against the mailing of possible obscenity, von Gloeden sold his pictures only from his home in Taormina. His clients included Richard Strauss, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde and Anatole France, who reportedly said to the photographer, "In showing us ancient Greece, you risk reminding us of their customsÖOurs could be changed by the nudity in your pictures." Von Gloeden's images were unsuccessfully prosecuted for obscenity by Mussolini's regime shortly after the photographer's death in 1931. Collectors now prize them for their light-shot clarity and dreamy sensuality.

Perhaps the most disturbingly ambiguous nudes in the history of photography were taken by Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Between 1867 and 1880, the Oxford mathematics don shot dozens of images of prepubescent girls au naturel, although only a few have survived. Dodgson set his subjects against landscape backdrops, then had the albumen prints tinted with oil paints to resemble academic canvases. The Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia owns two rare images of model Evelyn Hatch. One brings us a mini-odalisque in a Titian-esque pose that seems alarmingly brazen for its young subject, a sensation reinforced by the too-heavily-painted, masklike quality of her face. A second image charms by comparison-or by any other standard. Tiny, cherubic Evelyn is seated in front of a tree and alongside a pond. Her long tresses and the lily pads in the foreground evoke Shakespeare's Ophelia, a popular Pre-Raphaelite theme of the late 19th century.

Although an early 20th-century critic admiringly observed that Dodgson "worshipped [his subjects'] fresh, pure, unspoiled beauty," these images are likely to give us pause. They caused Dodgson anxiety as well. He asked Evelyn's mother to approach a colorist on his behalf, writing that "it might be a shock to her feelings if I did so." He also wrote another mother asking if she wanted more "full-front" pictures of the children, because he intended to destroy his extra prints, noting that they "so entirely defy conventional rules." There is, however, not the slightest evidence of improper conduct. Dodgson always photographed his subjects with the knowledge of their parents, and the daughter of one child-model later wrote that her "mother was the eldest of three girls all of whom adored Lewis Carroll."

After World War I, little lingering innocence remained. The Oscar Wilde trial in 1895 had brought the subject of homosexuality out of the closet, and the popularization of Freudian ideas during the 1920s unhinged conventional ideas about sexuality. Surrealist photographers including AndrÈ KÈrtËsz and Man Ray evoked the subconscious in dreamlike images of female nudes posed in patterned shadow or bizarrely reflected in distorting mirrors; Hans Bellmer's grotesquely bulbous "dolls" were downright nightmarish. But little of this Surrealist photography was actually shown, for although American museums had begun to exhibit photography in 1910, it remained segregated from other art forms.

Two early 20th-century photography projects that finally reached American audiences during the 1970s remind us that some of the most appealing work in photographic history had been driven underground. Both E.J. Bellocq's series of "Storyville Portraits" and BrassaÔ's "The Secret Paris of the 30's" are records of the demimonde. Bellocq photographed the prostitutes who worked the Storyville district of New Orleans; BrassaÔ shot the habituÈs of the Folies-BergËre and brothels. But the resemblance ends there. Bellocq was a World War I-era commercial photographer posthumously rediscovered by photographer Lee Friedlander, who spearheaded a major exhibition of his work at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1970. (The work provided the visual inspiration for Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby.) Bellocq spent his day shooting pictures for a shipbuilder and his nights photographing prostitutes in the buff for himself. Judging from his lovingly candid and remarkably unself-conscious portraits, it seems he and his models were friends. A woman on a daybed wearing just stockings and a mask manages to personify ease. The eroticism of this image raises the question of what separates art from pornography. In this case, it may simply be the endearing smile testifying to a more-than-casual relationship between model and photographer. Bellocq reportedly photographed opium dens in New Orleans's Chinatown, but there's no indication he ever thought of exhibiting any of his work.

BrassaÔ, too, photographed opium dens and whorehouses, and unlike Bellocq, he used the new fast cameras to shoot at night. Beginning in 1924, he strolled the dÈclassÈ 13th and 14th arrondissements of Paris with Henry Miller and took up photography to "translate all the things that enchanted" him. Perhaps because night photography was so new, his subjects seem barely aware of being photographed. BrassaÔ's pictures of the dancing and drinking patrons of the Monocle, a lesbian bar, reveal in compelling closeup the strictly delineated butch-femme drag they donned. When BrassaÔ's Paris de nuit was published in 1933, it did double duty as a virtuoso work of reportage and a guidebook for those attracted to the underground pleasures it documented. By the time it was published in the U.S. in 1976, it was a precious period piece.

Because of their illicit subject matter, it's unlikely that Bellocq's and BrassaÔ's pictures could have been published in the U.S. much earlier than the 1970s. (The book Storyville Portraits appeared in conjunction with the MoMA exhibition.) Photographs like these become controversial because they record the unconventional or the improper, and it goes without saying that many of us hold different conceptions of impropriety. But controversy also arises from misconceptions about what's actually being seen in a photograph-or revealed: in the case of Lewis Carroll or Sally Mann, child abuse isn't depicted, it exists only in the eyes of some beholders.