Porn: vassar st nude

by Mymy · 08.06.2026

When I first embarked on my quest for the lost nude “posture photos,” I could not decide whether to think of the phenomenon as a scandal or as an extreme example of academic folly—of what happens when well-intentioned institutions allow their reverence for the reigning conjectures of scientific orthodoxy to persuade them to do things that seem silly or scandalous in retrospect. And now that I’ve found them, I’m still not sure whether outrage or laughter is the more appropriate reaction. Your response, dear reader, may depend on whether your nude photograph is among them. And if you attended Yale, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith or Princeton—to name a few of the schools involved—from the 1940’s through the 1960’s, there’s a chance that yours may be.

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A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the National edition with the headline: A Secret Lies Hidden in Vassar and Yale Nude ‘Posture Photos’

In ” ‘Graduation From Hell’ ” (letter, June 12), Dick Cavett describes stolen photographs of nude Vassar students as “posture photos.” Such pictures were regularly made of incoming freshmen classes in the decades after World War II, not just at Vassar, but also at Harvard, Yale and probably elsewhere. They had nothing to do with posture, however; that is only what we were told.

Posture photographs have become rather notorious over the years. Their fame results at least partially from Ron Rosenbaum’s article, “Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal” that appeared in The New York Times Magazine a few years ago. Even without such publicity, the idea of nude photographs taken of young men and women attending the most elite colleges in the country over a period of forty or fifty years breathes scandal. They seem mysteriously unnecessary, their purpose inscrutable. In order to understand why these colleges took these pictures, it is necessary to assess the obsession with instilling correct posture into young people in the first half of the twentieth century. At Vassar, it is therefore necessary to turn to the department of physical education.

Although most elite eastern colleges took posture photographs in the mid-twentieth century, the procedures varied from school to school. As Professor Elizabeth Daniels described the method at Vassar: “In your freshman year you went over to the gym, Kenyon, where Professor Ruth Timm had set up a pro-tem photo booth. You changed into an angel-robe before entering the booth, shed the robe temporarily while your nude profile and rear views of your body were recorded, put the angel robe back on, and left… Ruth Timm analyzed the results with you and the two of you were going to work to improve your deficiencies. When you finished the fundamentals course, Miss Timm… committed the posture photos to the furnace.” In other words, the procedure was medical in tone, and the evidence destroyed at the end.