Bella’s work has delighted audiences for years and is regularly featured on radio and TV. Her ‘vinegar valentines’ research into Victorian anti-love-tokens provided questions for the BBC’s QI, was featured as , and receives annual international press coverage. Her investigations of amateur photography have shed light on and the enduring appeal of sunsets as subjects. A specialism in early twentieth-century utopias produced . Now she has turned her expert analytical gaze to the subject of British nudity.
was published in 2021 and examines the decades between the 1920s and the 1970s when naturist photography danced cheek-to-cheek with the evolving censorship laws in Britain. Bella recently presented highlight thoughts on the work at the ever-popular Brains at the Bevy event at The Bevy pub in Bevendean, Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³». With , this short introduction to the history of naturist publications is bound to bring new fans to her work.
Bella explores the tensions around the ways people have sought to interpret and promote nakedness in photographs and in print. She laughs at a British Library copy of Nudism in England (1933) in which a disgruntled borrower had scrawled “No pictures!”. It’s a serious and important study, though. As she says, “The nude body and its visual depiction have always attracted attention and generated heated debate. What and who should be seen and shown, by whom and where, form the basis of the social and moral codes that shape behaviour and belief.”
The history that Bella takes us through encompasses the growth of popular photographic printing, the solemnity with which early naturists championed their beliefs, and the questionable motives of photographers at a time when print and publication became cheaper and easier, and post-war freedom was creating new markets and challenging censorship.
Professor Pollen's book required a 'modesty flap' to permit use of the cover image on contemporary platforms such as Amazon and Twitter, despite the featured photograph passing censorship laws in 1951.