History of all things ARTnudes Network

(most things anyway)

ARTnudes.com launched from the city of New Orleans in 1997 as the first and only conglomerate of photographers and models actively working together to produce content for a fine art nude magazine  website. In 1997 the value of web hosting was astronomical so in order to sustain the website we had to turn it into an online magazine subscription with monthly features of our photoshoots with some of the most amazing New Orleans photographers there were; Bryce Lankard, Carlton Mickle, Zee Amer were three of our most featured photographers from 1997-2001. During those years we were interviewed by ABC Nightly News, featured in GQ magazine, listed in several art photography magazines and garnered quite a following by collectors who purchased the work we produced together. The website cost so much to run because we could not find a host who would allow us to show nudity (even though it was artistic in nature) and you actually had to pay fees for bandwidth overages. We had to resort to higher fees than normal websites by utilizing servers who charged more for this privilege. We have been censored since 1997 and have fought against this ever since. ARTnudes.com is now a place for photographers to announce their workshops, book releases, print sales and other important events they will be participating in.

Community Zoe (now offline and replaced by Figuremodels.org) was the sister website to ARTnudes.com. Community Zoe started because the subscribers to ARTnudes.com were also photographers who wanted to share their work with us, get critique on their images and possibly find models to work with who understood figure photography and landscape nudes. Originally it was just a simple discussion board set up on CommunityZERO.com but eventually that website shut us down and censored us and prevented us from posting even simple discussions let alone photographs. It was during this time that Zoe Wiseman and Bjoern Oldsen, a remarkable photographer from Germany, got together in an attempt to flip our proverbial middle fingers at CommunityZERO for shutting us down and censoring our work. Since Zoe Wiseman is the creator and owner of ARTnudes.com and this was her community Bjoern Oldsen asked her if he could create a website for her to keep our fledgling community in tact. So he built it and named it CommunityZOE in a unabashed protest to CommunityZERO with a full and total replica of how their website functioned.  In 1999 our Community was built and luckily being hosted by WebNameSolutions who quite happenstance was owned by the husband of a model Bjoern Oldsen worked with. They have since gone out of business much to our dismay. Community Zoe was a critique website for feed back on photographers work. Community Zoe also sold selected images in an online store for anyone interested in selling their work.

ZoeFEST the only annual fine art nude artist retreat was born from the friendships we made on CommunityZoe.com. Getting like minded people on the same website was one task but getting everyone to fly to Woodstock, NY USA in 2002 for our very first get together was just bonus fun. Aside from taking 2 years off in 2014 and 2015 the festival has run each and every year since then and will continue it’s annual art making in 2016. You can see some of our behind the scenes images on CommunityZoe.com and Figuremodels.org. You can also see some of the books we made together and gallery shows we curated. Michael Marlborough, the first subscriber of ARTnudes.com and one heck of a photographer located in Melbourne, Australia is a main producer of these events with Zoe Wiseman. It truly is a worldwide event held in the United States, Australia, Mexico… and maybe somewhere close to you next. To stay in the know and be one of the first to join us on our next trip be sure to visit ZoeFest.photo where you may learn all about it.

FigureModels.org was built in 2009 in an attempt to address the wishes of the photographers who were active in posting their work on CommunityZoe. They wanted an easier way to find models. We also needed a better way to connect. Since ARTnudes and CommunityZoe were built way before there was such a thing as social networks or OneModelPlace or ModelMayhem there was no way to send private messages or connect in a manner that we are all accustomed to in the year 2015. In 1999 there wasn’t even a Myspace yet let alone a Facebook, Figuremodels.org addresses some of those issues people were having. It is also a blogging platform for select photographers who wish to start their own blog for their fine art nude photography.

To know more or to get in touch with Zoe Wiseman please visit any one of these websites!