''Radiant Identities'' is a 1994

photography Photography is the visual arts, art, application, and practice of creating images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is empl ...

book by

Jock Sturges John Sturges (; born 1947), known as Jock Sturges, is an American photographer, best known for his images of nudist colony residents, particularly prepubescent children and early adolescents with their parents in Gascogne France and Northern ...

. The book consists of 60

black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white to produce a range of achromatic brightnesses of grey. It is also known as greyscale in technical settings. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, ...

images of both children and adults, many of which show

nudity Nudity is the state of being in which a human is without clothing. While estimates vary, for the first 90,000 years of pre-history, anatomically modern humans were naked, having lost their body hair, living in hospitable climates, and not ...

. Photos were taken primarily at nude beaches in France and

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

. The girl on the front cover is Misty Dawn, a model featured in many of Sturges' books. In the United States, the book has been mentioned in debates over whether nude pictures of children are art or pornography.

Controversy

In 1998 ''Radiant Identities'' and Sturges' previous book, '' The Last Day of Summer'', along with ''

The Age of Innocence ''The Age of Innocence'' is a novel by American author Edith Wharton, published on 25 October 1920. It was her eighth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine '' Pictorial Review''. Later that year, it was rele ...

'' by David Hamilton, faced controversy over their content in the US states of Alabama and Tennessee.

References

{{reflist 1994 non-fiction books Books of photographs Books of nude photography Nude photography showing children Nude photography showing men Nude photography showing women