British photographer David Hamilton (1933-2016) will always be recognized for his images of soft focus and blur portraying nude young women. He declared he was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, saying he shared the writers’s “obsession with purity” and that his work looked for 'the candour of a lost paradise'. “Like Lolita, this stage lasts for just a few months … it’s a magical moment, [because] then they become women, and spread their wings and fly.”
In the 1970s, his erotic-romantic images published in books and kitschy calendars raised few eyebrows. His 1977 soft-focus erotic film Bilitis became an aesthetic manifesto for a generation of artists.
By the start of the 21st century, his pictures had begun to divide opinion; what he claimed was innocence and candour appeared not just passé but perverse and pornographic. His photographs have long been at the forefront of the ‘is it art or pornography?’ debate, his work was always sparking controversy.
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