Madonna

Part I:

The Lee Friedlander Sessions

On stage, in flashy trash and laser light, her sneer says, "Toy with me, I'll toy with you." On screen, she is Susan of the streets, canny and in control. On MTV, she is the belly button America loves. Once a Lower East Side gadabout, she is this season's sex symbol. And like Marilyn Monroe before her, Madonna Louise Ciccone did some nude posing before she got famous. These photographs were taken by two well-known art photographers during numerous sessions in 1979-1980. Madonna was working as a nude model while forming a band.

Since we turned down those nude photos of Vanessa Williams, some people will ask why we're publishing these. It's simple. We think Vanessa genuinely didn't know what she was doing, didn't know her photos might be published. More important, we didn't want to destroy her career. Madonna, on the other hand, posed repeatedly for two noted photographers who routinely publish what they shoot. The results--seen here for the very first time--attest to Lee Friedlander's and Martin H. Schreiber's talent and to Madonna's unusual beauty.

For those of you living in soundproof booths, Madonna's first two albums went platinum. Her Virgin tour has Michael Jackson and Prince stewing in the musical background. Desperately Seeking Susan made her the hottest young actress in Hollywood. Best of all, her onstage contortions and Boy Toy voice have put sopping sex back where it belongs--front and center in the limelight.

"I was curious to try my hand at the nude." That's how Lee Friedlander, a man with three Guggenheim fellowships and a 1981 Medal of Paris to his credit, recalls his reason for making pictures of Madonna.

So here you are, Lee Friedlander, curious about the nude. A painter friend of yours recommends a model, one Madonna Louise Ciccone.

"She seemed very confident, a street-wise girl," says Friedlander. "She told me she was putting a band together, but half the kids that age are doing that. She was a good professional model."

A photographer of the natural world as well as of the social landscape, Friedlander had certain things in mind in trying the nude.

"There's something perfect about the nude," he muses. "Each kind of subject is different. Say you want to photograph a rose in black and white. You have to portray the rose--approach it so that it doesn't look like concrete. Whether the subject is a rose, a tree or a nude, you look for something unique."

Madonna is something unique. You've seen her exude a very sexual furor in the movies, on TV, in videos, on tour. And now you've seen the world's number-one Boy Toy as a rose in black and white.

Part II:

The Martin H. Schreiber Sessions

The Photographing the Nude course at New York's New School was founded by Martin H. Schreiber, whose students spent February 12 and 14, 1979, cutting their photographic teeth on a "beautiful, intelligent, unconventional" lady named Madonna.

"She was skinnier six years ago," says Schreiber, whose book credits include Bodyscapes and Last of a Breed. "There was something special about her; that's for sure. I think she's quite beautiful now, but she had a different kind of beauty then."

Schreiber's advanced-photography students met a girl who had to be paid in cash for her modeling work because she had no bank account but who clearly had inner resources.

"I don't think she really knew what she wanted yet," recalls the photographer, "but she had some ideas. She was experimenting. She would do whatever it took to get where she wanted to go."

Which was up. Around that time, her experiments led her to front for a band called the Breakfast Club, and before long, she would parlay a new blonde 'do, a set of pipes made for pop music and the kittenish bod you see here into the Image. She would become the compleat Boy Toy.

This was to be an Eighties Boy Toy, however, not some frosted cupcake. The voice and body are her bona fides, but Madonna's secret may be her satirical bite. She knows a lot of this Image stuff is bullshit; she knows that you know. So as long as we're all in on the gag, let's enjoy it.

The Image would make Madonna the hottest star of 1985, but things were less warm in 1979.

"It was cold in my studio. I had two heaters on Madonna," Schreiber remembers. "But she was laughing, having a good time. There was no hesitation on her part. 'Here I am. It's no big deal'--that's the way she was. I was fascinated by her."

Schreiber's fascination--he knew his model somewhat better than Friedlander did--may be the reason his photos of her seem a little more street-wise (there's that word again). Friedlander was making studies of an anonymous nude, while Schreiber was discovering a persona. "With a lot of nudes, I don't photograph faces," the latter says. "But with her, I wanted to include that face. Madonna had such a face."

Still does. She had yet to fine-tune Madonna Louise, a girl without a checkbook, into Madonna, a phenomenon without a need for one. Still, while her face and form were beautiful, Schreiber was more interested in shooting the inner Madonna than her now-famous innie.

"The nudes I've done are lovely," he says without a blush. "There's something wonderful in a beautiful form that happens to be someone's body. One of my roles is to make people look at nudes differently--I'm trying to make people feel less uptight about their bodies, because we're living in a puritanical age."

Sounds like a song cue, doesn't it? We're living in a puritanical age, in a material world. Her records would have you think she's just a material girl, but the year she spent as an artist's model left a record of a different Madonna--an ethereal young woman who could laugh off the chill of obscurity. Madonna knew she'd be hot before long.