David Lynch’s spooky nudes are a ‘peep show for the psyche’

David Lynch is something of a connoisseur when it comes to the female nude. The director himself has previously published more than a hundred black-and-white nudes in his book Nudes (2017), and that’s not to mention the flesh-baring scenes in his films, from Blue Velvet to Mulholland Drive. 

In the 2020s, meanwhile, Lynch’s fascination with the female nude has taken him back in time, to the dawn of erotic photography, as showcased in his Distorted Nude Photogravures. Newly shared by Approximately Blue, the series of twelve eerie prints marks the artist and director’s first use of digital manipulation, used on NSFW photos taken a century ago.

Of course, this is David Lynch we’re talking about – the resulting images are pretty far from your average pin-up pics. Instead, the monochrome portraits are warped and deformed. A reclining figure’s face is blurred to resemble a skull. A severed torso floats in a vaguely domestic interior, another in a black void. A third body levitates a few feet off the ground, a mysterious curtain blowing in from the side.

Described as “peep shows for the psyche”, the photos in Distorted Nude Photogravures also speak to Lynch’s obsession with darkness and liminality. Black shadows represent depth and “egress”, where the contents of the mind are both hidden and revealed. The pictures “are [a] meditation,” says Approximately Blue in a statement, “on perception, voyeurism, and the spaces we inhabit both physically and psychologically.”

Take a look at David Lynch’s Distorted Nude Photogravures for yourself in the gallery above. Fancy one in your living room, to scare off boring house guests? You’re in luck! The artist’s prints are going for $3,000 through Approximately Blue.