Block 0
— Intro

This is not a course in the usual sense. Think of it as entering a secret room. A space where we look at the body, at desire, and at ourselves through a different lens.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional photographer, an amateur with a camera, or simply someone fascinated by art and intimacy. What matters is curiosity.

We’ll move block by block, each like a chapter.

• First, we step into history: how Eros has always lived in art, from marble to photography.
• Then we’ll meet the masters who showed us how far desire can stretch an image.
• After that, I’ll share my own journey—the mistakes, the lessons, the experiments—together with some unpublished photographs from past shootings, images that have never left my archive until now.
• And in each block, you’ll practice: through reflections, visual exercises, and small experiments that turn theory into discovery.

What you’ll take away is not just knowledge, but a shift in perception. You’ll begin to see how eroticism breathes in images everywhere—how suggestion can be stronger than exposure, how mystery can linger longer than clarity.

If you enter with openness, you won’t leave the same. You’ll carry with you a sharper eye, a deeper sensitivity, and maybe even a more intimate relationship with your own desires


Jurij Treskow
August'25
Paris

Block 1
— Eros in Art: From Marble to the Lens


Long before photography, artists were already wrestling with the body and desire. The Greeks carved marble gods and heroes, giving flesh a divine weight. The Renaissance turned nudity into a language of beauty, power, and spirituality. Painters used the body not only to seduce the eye, but to speak about fertility, fragility, and strength.

Eros has always been present in art. In Greece, he was a winged boy with arrows. In the Renaissance, he became marble—frozen, admired, untouchable. Photography changed this. Suddenly, Eros was no longer an idea on a pedestal. He was alive, present, unpredictable, standing in the same room as the viewer.

With photography came new distinctions. Nudity, eroticism, and pornography are not the same thing:

Nudity is neutral. A body without clothes can be tender, vulnerable, sculptural, or simply present. It doesn’t automatically carry erotic charge.

Eroticism begins when tension enters the frame. It lives in suggestion, atmosphere, intimacy. It is charged precisely because it leaves space for the imagination.

Pornography, by contrast, removes that space. It is direct, graphic, explicit. Once nothing is left unsaid, the energy collapses into information.

The masters of erotic photography each approached these boundaries differently, showing me that desire can take countless forms.

Man Ray fractured reality, making the nude surreal, dreamlike. “A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a photograph, you need to be in love.” His work reminded me that eroticism begins not with the body, but with the gaze.

Edward Weston showed that a body could be treated like sculpture, like landscape—pure form.

Helmut Newton introduced danger and provocation. “Some people’s photography is an art. Mine is not… What I like to do is go to the limits — to play with erotica, fetishism, death, violence — not because I find them in any way attractive, but because I find them interesting.” His women weren’t passive; they were commanding, untouchable.

Jeanloup Sieff offered the opposite: softness, elegance, shadows that whispered instead of shouted.

Ellen von Unwerth brought play, mischief, laughter—desire without heaviness. “I like to portray women in a sensual way — strong but playful… Eroticism is a game, a form of empowerment.”

Sante d’Orazio blurred glamour and intimacy, making photographs feel cinematic, polished, yet raw.

Guy Bourdin pushed fashion into the erotic and surreal. “It’s not about showing sex. It’s about suggestion — the tension before.”

Others crossed even closer to pornography, but in their hands it became art.

Robert Mapplethorpe: “I’m looking for perfection in form. I do consider myself, in a way, a pornographic artist. But pornography can be beautiful… I’m talking about sex between two men that can be as beautiful as the Louvre.”

Nobuyoshi Araki: “For me, taking erotic photographs is the same as living. It’s an inseparable part of everyday life. Eroticism is not only about sex. It is about death, about loss, about what we hold on to when everything else disappears.”

Diane Arbus showed another truth: eroticism without glamour, sexuality as raw exposure. “Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.”

These voices taught me that pornography is not always a reduction. In rare hands, it becomes another language of Eros—confrontational, direct, but still capable of tenderness, poetry, even transcendence.

More recently, Harley Weir reminded me that eroticism can whisper. Her images feel like fragments of memory—tender, painterly, vulnerable. Viviane Sassen bends the body into abstraction, where shadow and geometry become erotic in themselves. Together, they represent a new wave that reimagines sexuality not as spectacle but as atmosphere, as poetry.

Each of these artists taught me something different. Some pushed me toward provocation, others toward restraint. Some even showed me that pornography itself could be reimagined as art. In the end, I realized there isn’t one way to photograph desire. There are many. The task is not to stay in their voices, but to find your own inside all this noise.

Lessons & Exercises


Art Connection
Choose three artworks (painting, sculpture, drawing) from before photography that depict the nude. Note how desire, power, or intimacy is expressed. Is it explicit, symbolic, or hidden in gesture?

Mapping Influences
Write down 3–4 photographers or artists who influence you most. For each, note one thing you admire (light, power, play, softness, intimacy) and one thing you don’t want to copy. This helps separate inspiration from imitation.

Image Analysis
Collect three images: one nude, one erotic, one pornographic. Don’t label them at first. Study them and ask: Where is the tension? What is revealed? What is withheld? Then place them into categories.

Recreate vs. Transform
Choose a single image by a master that inspires you. First, recreate it as faithfully as you can—same light, pose, atmosphere. Then shoot a second version where you change one key element (angle, light, mood, framing). Compare the two. Which feels like theirs? Which feels like yours?

Silent Gallery Exercise
Spend 15 minutes with a book or archive of erotic photography. Don’t analyze. Just notice your body’s response: when do you lean closer, when do you turn away? Afterwards, write down three images that stayed in your mind. Those reactions are the first clues to your own voice.