Erotic Nudes by Harvey Milk - Limited Licensed Editions

Archival fine art prints, mounted and framed, 16"x20", limited edition series of 10 for each image.

Photographs by Harvey Milk

Original scans courtesy of Daniel Nicoletta, permissions courtesy of Harvey Milk Archives--Scott Smith Collection (GLC 35), Hormel LGBTQIA Center, San Francisco Public Library.

Interview with Dan Nicoletta about the provenance of these incredible images:

"After Harvey died, I had the good fortune to go through all of his black and white negatives and proof sheets because I decided that before they went to the library for permanent deposit, by way of wishes of Scott Smith, his executor.  I decided that I would strike proof sheets of all the black and white negatives so that as research continued at the library people would have an easy reference to what that binder of negatives had in it. I was super curious myself to see what was in his personal collection of black and white 35 millimeter negative sheets. 

And, lo and behold, there were a couple rolls of erotic work done which were very typical of the times. Like if you had a boyfriend and he had another boyfriend, you would say, ‘hey, let's take pictures and play and have sex.’ You know, ‘next weekend’, that type of thing. So it feels to me like they are his photographs. Yeah, these go way back. I think these go back to that first year when they first came to San Francisco. 

And don't forget, this is the year when Harvey's only just thinking about running for election and he's still attending the bathhouses. He's still smoking a little pot. He's really kind of living his life as a counterculture person. And he's politicized, but he hasn't thrown his hat in the race by then, so he's probably doing some erotic photography as well. That's my sense of it. We don't have anybody left that can really say for certain: ‘Oh, yeah, that's so and so.’ Or ‘that was definitely a thing that Harvey did.’ 

There really isn't much more of that in the collection. There were just those couple of sessions. They're quite wonderful because they were typical of how people celebrated their friendships and their relationships. Now that we're heading into a puritanical era, it's really important to be out and not pinkwash this stuff. It's kind of ironic that we're heading to these times where this type of thing would be under tremendous scrutiny in terms of a person's personal life."