Rudolf Nureyev's nude photos--

Hi. Evidently there were a lot of nude photos of Nureyev. Below is a passage from the book Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh (pages 153-155).  Hope you enjoy this passage. I know I did! And please forgive any typos. If they're there, they are mine alone, and do not appear in Kavanagh's book.  Best wishes, Carl Miller Daniels 

     In homage to Rudolf's glamor and beauty, Avedon focused as much on the dancer's face and naked torso as on the shapes he made in space, capturing myriad expressions -- challenging, wry, off guard, and giggling, languidly sensual with rumpled hair and half-closed eyes. After several hours Avedon told Rudolf that he would like to photograph him in the nude. "Your body at this moment should be recorded. Every muscle. Because it's the body of the greatest dancer in the world." Rudolf needed little persuasion. Like many in his profession, he was not prudish, regarding his sexuality as just another manifestation of his physical prowess. "Who better to do it than me?" Avedon told him, and Rudolf agreed. He felt in complete accord with this fellow artist -- the most theatrical of photographers, all his images, scenes. Stripping off his remaining practice clothes, Rudolf began to collaborate with Avedon on a series of flying poses that were breathtakingly abandoned while still discreet. Then, without any prompting, he stopped moving, faced the camera, and stared into the lens.

"As I went on photographing, he slowly raised his arms, and as his arms went up, so did his penis. It was as if he was dancing with every part of himself. His whole body was responding to a kind of wonder at himself. I thought this was the most beyond-words moment -- too beautiful to be believed. A narcissistic orgy of some kind. An orgy of one."

     The next morning, full of remorse, and remembering the words of Pushkin's letter -- that Paris was a city of decadence that would corrupt his moral integrity -- Rudolf decided to call on Avedon and beg him to destroy the final frames. "He just walked to the door and said, 'I've left Russia -- that in itself is a scandal. Now I'm doing exactly what they expect of me.'" Convincing Rudolf that he must safeguard the pictures -- "Because when you're an old man, you'll want to look at the miracle you were" -- Avedon summoned an assistant who went into the darkroom and returned with an envelope he handed to Rudolf. The dancer then moved in very close and lifted up Avedon's glasses. "Look at me," he whispered, "and tell me these are all the negatives." Avedon stared back, his eyes bloodshot with exhaustion after working through the night in the developing room, and repeated, "These are all the negatives. But don't destroy them." Satisfied, Rudolf left the studio.

     There was an unfinished roll left in Avedon's camera. Thirty-seven years later, wanting to feature the dancer as an erotic icon of the decade, he used one of the few remaining full-length, full-frontal Nureyev nudes in his book The Sixties. Rudolf would occasionally feign hostility toward Avedon, once preposterously claiming that he had sold one of the nudes to the CIA, "who used it in an antihomosexual booklet." In fact his rancor amounted to no more than a caprice; not only did he eagerly return for several subsequent Avedon sessions over the years, but he admitted when seeing the pictures for the first time, "I knew that he had understood me." Revealing the same sensitivity to movement that the photographer admired in Fragonard, the frames translate Rudolf's sexuality into images of perfect control, yet keep "the nervous edge of it alive always, not simply a pose"; while the explicit nudes are the "terrible et merveilleux miroir" that Cocteau described to Avedon in a telegram of thanks: evidence of vulnerability as much as superhuman virility -- the exposure of having entered a new life with no possessions, "almost as naked as when I was born."