The Story Behind Madonna's 1979 Nude Photographs
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On 12 February 1979, an unknown 20-year-old dancer walked into a New York photography studio to earn a few dollars posing for an evening class. She gave her name as Madonna Ciccone. Six years later, the resulting photographs would spark a bidding war between two of America's biggest magazines, sell millions of extra copies on newsstands, and become one of the more unusual footnotes in the career of the woman who'd go on to be one of the best selling music artists of all time.
Quick Answers
Who took Madonna's 1979 nude photos? Photographer Martin H.M. Schreiber photographed her during a nude photography class he taught in New York. Separately, photographer Lee Friedlander took his own set of nude photographs of her around the same period.
How much was Madonna paid for the photos? Life modelling for art classes typically paid a modest session fee at the time, generally reported as somewhere around 25 to 50 dollars for the sitting. Friedlander's session is specifically recorded as paying 25 dollars.
Why did the photos become famous years later? In 1985, once Madonna was a major pop star, Playboy and Penthouse both raced to publish nude photographs of her taken before her fame, Playboy using the Schreiber and Friedlander images and Penthouse a separate set. Both issues became some of the best selling in each magazine's history.
A Dancer With 35 Dollars in Her Pocket
Madonna arrived in New York from Michigan in 1978 with, by her own account, 35 dollars to her name and a plan to make it as a dancer. Like plenty of young performers in the city at the time, she supported herself with whatever paid work she could find between auditions, and life modelling for art schools and photography classes was steady, straightforward money. It didn't require an agent, a portfolio or connections, just a willingness to sit still.
The Night She Walked Into Schreiber's Class
Martin Schreiber, a Czech-born photographer who'd immigrated to the US as a child and was teaching nude photography at Parsons School of Design, later described the moment plainly: a quiet, shy young woman arrived as the model for his evening class, introduced herself as a dancer named Madonna Ciccone, and turned out to be one of the loveliest and most natural models he'd ever worked with. He photographed her again on a couple of further occasions that year. Decades later, once the photographs had made him internationally known, Schreiber admitted the session was never quite as personal or considered as people assumed. "I was taking pictures from behind my students," he said, "it wasn't as if I had a private session and could get her to do what I wanted her to do."
Not the Only Camera in the Room
Schreiber wasn't the only photographer who captured her that year. Around the same period, the acclaimed street photographer Lee Friedlander, already well established through decades of gallery and museum work, photographed his own nude series of her, reportedly paying her 25 dollars for the sitting. Friedlander typically preferred shooting models in domestic settings rather than a studio, working around ordinary household objects and furniture instead of formal backdrops. He later described her plainly as "very confident, a street-wise girl." At the time, neither photographer had any reason to think they were sitting on anything more than a set of contact sheets from a working model who needed the money.
A Familiar Playbook
None of this was actually new territory for Playboy. Its very first issue, in December 1953, had launched on the exact same formula: a nude photograph of a struggling, then-unknown actress, taken years earlier when she badly needed the money. Marilyn Monroe had posed for photographer Tom Kelley in 1949 for 50 dollars, to cover a car payment, and had no say at all when Hugh Hefner bought the rights to the image from a calendar company in 1953 and put it on the cover of his brand new magazine. Monroe was never paid a cent by Playboy itself. Madonna's case in 1985 followed almost exactly the same shape: a broke young woman posing for a small fee years before fame found her, photographs owned outright by the photographer rather than the subject, and a magazine cashing in on the gap between who she'd been and who she'd since become. The only real difference was that Madonna, unlike Monroe, was very much alive, extremely online for the era in her own combative way, and entirely unwilling to play the embarrassed victim the story wanted her to be.
A Magazine War, Six Years Later
By the summer of 1985, Madonna was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, freshly engaged to actor Sean Penn and riding the success of Like a Virgin. That July, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione announced he'd acquired a separate set of nude photographs of her, taken in 1979 by a different photographer, Bill Stone, and would publish them in the magazine's September issue. Playboy, holding the rights to the Schreiber and Friedlander images, moved fast to compete, and what followed was a genuine publishing skirmish: both magazines repeatedly bumped up their release dates to beat the other onto newsstands, each publicly running down the other's material.
Guccione dismissed Playboy's set as "scraping the bottom of the barrel," while Playboy's editors countered that their own photographs were tasteful rather than explicit. Playboy also drew a pointed contrast with a scandal from the previous year, when the magazine had turned down nude photographs of newly crowned Miss America Vanessa Williams, taken without her full understanding that they might ever be published, images Penthouse ran instead. Madonna's case was different, Playboy argued in its own pages, since she had posed repeatedly for two established photographers who routinely published their work. When the dust settled, Playboy had sold roughly 5.9 million copies of that September issue, about 350,000 more than its usual run, and Penthouse sold around 5.2 million, some 300,000 above normal. Between two magazines, that's the better part of ten million copies moved off the strength of photographs a struggling dancer had posed for six years earlier for grocery money.
I'm Not Ashamed of Anything
Madonna herself never tried to suppress the story or deny the photographs were real. Through her spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg, she issued a short, characteristically unbothered statement: she wasn't ashamed of anything, she'd acknowledged posing for art classes many times before, and she wasn't even entirely sure herself when or where the various sessions had taken place. On 9 July 1985, days before the magazines even hit newsstands, she made the point herself, appearing on the cover of the New York Post under the headline I'M NOT ASHAMED, a phrase that stuck to the whole episode ever since.
She kept the same tone in public through the rest of that summer. Days later, walking onto the Live Aid stage at Wembley in front of a global television audience on a warm July afternoon, she joked to the crowd that she wasn't taking her jacket off no matter how hot it got, since the tabloids would probably still be using it against her in ten years. Rather than damaging her career, as more than a few people confidently predicted it would at the time, the episode barely registered as a setback. If anything it reinforced the persona she was already building, unapologetic, sexually confident and entirely uninterested in the shame that a scandal like this was supposed to produce.
From Newsstand Scandal to Warhol Canvas
The story took one more unexpected turn that same year. Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, both by then friends and occasional collaborators of Madonna's within New York's downtown art scene, got hold of the New York Post's I'M NOT ASHAMED front page and altered it into a piece of pop art in its own right, folding a genuine tabloid scandal straight into the same gallery world that had once made stars out of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens. It's a fairly neat illustration of how quickly the story shifted from something meant to embarrass her into something closer to cultural material she and her circle could simply absorb and repurpose.
What Happened to the Photographs After
Schreiber went on to publish his own images repeatedly over the following decades, in the books Madonna Nude 1979, I Madonna and the expanded Madonna Nudes+, which included previously unseen frames from the same sessions. Friedlander's separate series was published in book form too and has become some of the most valuable work of his career, with one print selling for 37,500 dollars at a Christie's auction in 2009, a considerable jump from whatever a few hours of a broke dancer's time was worth in 1979. Nearly half a century on, the photographs remain a strange but enduring footnote, less a scandal now than a genuine artefact of exactly how far Madonna's own image travelled between that February evening in a Parsons classroom and global superstardom.
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For another photographer who built a career from behind the lens of glamour work, read Peter Gowland: The Photographer Who Built His Own Cameras to Shoot Hollywood's Pin-Ups.
For another woman whose image as an artist's nude model outlived and outgrew her, see Audrey Munson: The Rise and Fall of America's First Supermodel.
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