Remembering Eva Grant (1924-2024)

A look at the life and work of an influential nude photographer

Eva Grant was a former glamour model turned glamour photographer who photographed for nudist/naturist magazines postwar. She died on January 22nd, 2024, just nine weeks shy of her 100th birthday.

I was intrigued by her when I researched my 2021 book, Nudism in a Cold Climate, as she represented one of a very small band of British women who worked as professional nude photographers. The fact that she made the move into the profession from the other side of the camera also added to her story. I found women’s voices harder to locate than men’s in the history of nudism in Britain, and in the history of nude photography. They tended to get spoken on behalf of, but Grant was an exception: she seized the means of production to develop her own photography business and she built her own publishing platform through which to show it.

As I wrote in my book, Grant began her career by modelling in swimwear; these were pin-up productions for amateur photographers. Initially this was just a side hustle to supple­ment her daily wage. She found she could earn more in an hour as a model than in a week as a student nurse, however, and she found modelling boring. She grew more interested in a role behind the camera.

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As a photographer, Grant sold outdoor nudes to British naturist magazines like Health and Efficiency in the mid-1950s but she also supplied more suggestive photographs for cheap pin-up magazines; this was a common practice at the time for enterprising photographers who could serve both aspects of a divided market. Grant also produced her own pocket-sized serial publication, Line and Form, under her publishing imprint Photoform. In addition to modelling and taking photographs, Grant acted as a nude model agent, ran a busy central London studio providing instruction for aspiring nude photographers, and penned advice articles for photographic magazines.

In these articles, she detailed what was distinctive about being a female nude photographer. “It helps break down that innate suspicion,” she said, “that lurks deep down in the heart of every young girl when she stands unclothed, for the first time, in the presence of a strange man.” In addition, she noted that having been a model herself gave her “tremendous advantage” in reaching a successful result, which was a “combined effort” produced by “a true bond between the two persons either side of the camera.” This team approach presented a different viewpoint to some mid-century male photographers who considered “mastery” of the nude to be a measure of their virility. By the end of the 1950s, Grant was selling work on both sides of the Atlantic. British photography magazines called her “one of the most expert and experienced woman glamour photographers in the busi­ness,” and in the US, she was described as “the world’s foremost female figure photographer.”

Although I had several of Grant’s publications, it was through the detective work of Ellie Howard, the picture editor of Nudism in a Cold Climate, that we were able to track down Grant’s family and find out more about her life and work. Grant’s daughter was delighted that I included her mother's story and images in the book. This contact led directly to a new wave of recent interest in Grant’s work and the republication of some of her photographs by Wolfbait Books. I send my deepest sympathies to her family. 🪐

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Check out Annebella Pollen’s book Nudism in a Cold Climate for more of the unique history and cultural impact of the nudist movement in Britain.