Around 1860, Nadar—one of the most renowned photographers of his time—produced a series of nine photographs of a person described in contemporary terms as a “Hermaphrodite.” This is the earliest known photographic series explicitly devoted to what was then called hermaphroditism, and it is now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
The commission likely originated with a physician who sought to document the body with both “artistry” and “truth,” combining medical scrutiny with Nadar’s distinctive studio style. The sitter’s name has not been recorded, and their anonymity reinforces the series’ enigmatic status: a sequence in which aesthetic staging and medical curiosity are tightly entangled. From this moment through at least the 1930s, such images exemplify how medical representation and artistic practice repeatedly intersected in the visualisation of so-called “anomalies” of sex.
