Fake Swimmer Photos
Until the 1960s, boys and men swam naked when there were no women around, and this included high school and college swimming pools and the YMCA. Men's swim teams generally practiced naked, though they wore swimsuits for public competitions. Girls and women always wore swimsuits.
The reason that was given for boys and men swimming naked was that the fibers from cloth swimsuits tended to clog the swimming pool filters. This was clearly bogus, since the girls' and women's swimsuits were much larger and would clog the filters much more, and yet they were required to wear swimsuits. The real reason was the sexist belief that girls had to be more modest than boys, a common mindset at the time, reinforced by the age-old practice of boys and men swimming naked in farm ponds and rivers while the women stayed home.
What about the photographic evidence? The Internet is full of "vintage" photos of naked men at public swim meets, and of mixed-sex swim teams where the men are naked and the women have swimsuits. Unfortunately, almost all of these photos are fakes. Let's have a look:
We start with a photo that I previously posted as authentic (for the 4th of July, because of the flag), and then I found out it was a fake. This dramatic photo of a nude diver (above) said it was from a swim meet at Berea College, Kentucky, and this image has proliferated on the Internet.
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Above is the actual original photo, photographed by Joe Scherschel for LIFE magazine and found in the LIFE photo archive. The explanatory info about the fake photo was fake, too. The photo was actually taken at a swim meet at Ohio State University in 1953.
Likewise, this photo of a naked diver at a swim meet has been widely copied on the Internet, but it's fake.
Above is the original photo, also from the LIFE archive, taken at another swim meet at OSU in 1951. Note how the nude photo has been cropped to remove the LIFE watermark to hide its origin.
A number of fake photos showing men's and women's teams together, with the men nude, were made by altering photos from a Russian document reviewing the history of competitive swimming in Russia. Take, for example, this photo on the Internet.
The original, above, is a Russian city swim team from 1937. Why did the fakers use Russian photos? Perhaps because the original photos would not be familiar to American audiences, so the fakes would go undetected.
Here's another supposed mixed men's and women's team photo.
It's actually this Russian photo from 1950.
What about these guys and girls, said to be from 1950?
They are actually Russian swimmers from 1941-1945.
This photo shows a couple of naked competitors approaching the starting blocks as male and female observers look on.
Except they really wore swimsuits at this opening ceremony in Moscow in 1946.
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Why did people create these fake nude images? Just for the hell of it, I guess, and because Photoshop makes it easy. What's ironic is that there are plenty of genuine nude images of swimmers from that era. Above is a genuine photo of Michigan State coach Matt Mann talking to one of his swimmers, photographed for LIFE magazine by William Vandivert in 1938.
By the way, none of these LIFE photos were actually published in the magazine, although LIFE did occasionally publish rear nudity (never frontal). The LIFE photo archive, available online, contains 4 million photos taken by its photographers, most of which were never published.
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Here's another photo from the same 1938 photo session, showing Michigan State swimmers naked in the pool, practicing their kicking.
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We end with another authentic photo taken by LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1937, showing Yale swim coach Bob Kiphuth. Although they might not have had mixed-sex nude swim teams as shown in the fake photos, the men and boys in that era actually were unashamed males.
21 comments:
Hell, in my high school and college swim classes, nobody wor trunks. Half the time the instructors were naked. And the YMCAs were bareass until the mid-70s to early 80s.
The fake photos are fascinating but it incredibly curious how Americas views in nudity have changed from when the wildly popular Life magazine posted many nude photos and no one thought anything of it. All very innocent. And just a few decades later and that could never happen.
But there weren't photos either.
The Life photos were never published.
What I can say is, the American Public Health Association did in fact recommend nude swimming for males prior to 1962.
I'm a lot younger, but in my middle school to high school years, my (all male) friends and I went swimming at the pond. We didn't wear a thing.
I actually have most of the photos that depict naked men swimming in front of, or with women. It is saddening to me to find that they were photoshopped. It is absolute fact that boys and men did swim naked at school and at the YMCA. I have read accounts by boys who remember instances of swimming naked in front of females. This subject has really fascinated me for years. It also is more common in the European countries. I just don't understand the thinking about falsifying such things. I can certainly understand WANTING for such things to be, but that is not a good reason to make up a false impression.
I'm always annoyed when I find that an image in my collection has been Photoshopped.
It was in my dad's (b1920) memory that of course men swim naked and when I took a swim class he was opposed to spending the money to get me a suit. Because whatever for, the class cost enough? He didn't care that it was mixed and didn't think that I would care either (I did not and went to two classes that way.)
My sisters bribed me to wear the one that they and my mom got me by getting a Man From Atlantis suit. I wanted to be Mark Harris (and I wanted Patrick Duffy)
LIFE photographers sure took a lot of photos of nude men. Yes, vast percentage were unpublished, but it makes one wonder.
On the cloth bathing suit: Consider how much link top-loading washing machines collected lint after every wash. If a pool doesn't have sufficient filtration, then lint from swimmers would accumulate in the pool and cloud the water over time. And that is on top of issue of lint getting caught in nooks and crannies in the filtration/heating system and reducing efficiency over time.
Later on, these systems have been equipped with better filters and pumps/heaters that would not let lint get caught.
The advent of synthetics (nylon and later lycra) solved the problem but even today, many swim in cloth (some now even wear underwear in pool so they don't have to be naked in locker room).
In my days, I was though that being a man meant one is not affraid of being naked in locker room. And I read at one point that in a sport context, one was immune from being labeled as "gay" if naked in locker room or even kissing a team mate after a goal.
Suspect that this immunity disappeared for younger generations who fear that being naked in locker room is a gay thing, hence the towel dance.
@Anon - I agree that the lint issue may have been real. What was bogus was citing that issue as the reason why males could swim nude, while ignoring the fact that females were required to wear swimsuits.
Oh yeah, fond memories of The Man From Atlantis and Patrick Duffy.
Are you saying none of the Life Magazine nude photos were published?
Which is very different than saying most were not published.
There definitely was a lot of nude male swimming going on. At the Y and also at the lake.
They really did. Amazing really.
@Anon - I'm saying that the LIFE magazine photos IN THIS POST were not published. Other photos showing rear nudity were published in LIFE.
very interesting
They were taken, but not published. Comstock Act, remember?
Also, there was a LOT of chlorine at the time, enough to discolor suits.
Of course, women didn't swim naked. I'm sure some would psychoanalyze this: Men being taught to be proud of their bodies (and the penis), women being taught to be ashamed of their bodies, penis envy blah blah blah.
So, let's get things clear. Swimming suits worn by males clogged the pools' filtering systems. Swimming suits worn by women (of the same material) did not clog pools' filtering systems. Interesting to note that the "double standard" was alive and well years ago and not just a 21st century issue.
@Anon - We're saying the same thing about male vs female swimsuits. And the sexual double standard goes back a long time. It was first documented in 1960 (but it goes back much farther than that) regarding attitudes toward pre-marital sex: if a male does it, he's a stud; if a female does it, she's a slut.
Even before that. The double standard is pretty much universal.
Wonderful series and research on your part. Definitely strikes a chord with readers.
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