MADONNA - NUDES 1979

Photographs: Martin H. M. Schreiber
Publisher: Taschen
Year: 1990
Edition: First Taschen Edition
Language: English
Format: Softcover

A photographic publication documenting a series of early portraits of Madonna taken in New York in 1979, years before her emergence as one of the defining cultural figures of the 1980s.

Photographed by Martin H. M. Schreiber while Madonna was working as a dancer, the images offer an unusually raw and unguarded view of the future pop icon. Removed from the elaborate styling, choreography, and visual construction that would later characterize her public persona, the photographs preserve a moment in which her identity remained largely outside the machinery of celebrity.

The photographs were originally produced in the context of an academic photography session, giving the series an immediacy and intimacy distinct from conventional celebrity portraiture. Their later circulation acquired an entirely different significance following Madonna’s rise to international fame, transforming photographs made before her public recognition into documents of cultural history.

This shift in context is central to the publication: the images exist simultaneously as an intimate photographic record and as evidence of how authorship, identity, and media can alter the meaning of an image over time. What began as a private or academic photographic encounter became part of the visual mythology surrounding one of the most recognizable figures in contemporary popular culture.

Published by Taschen in 1990 as its First Edition, this volume preserves a rare visual record of Madonna before the construction of the icon, offering a compelling study of photography, celebrity, and the transformation of personal imagery into cultural archive.