What are the rules about photographing nudes?
This is a huge and volatile topic, so let me try to narrow the scope a little. First, let’s assume we’re talking about subjects who are legally competent adults. Let’s also assume that you are taking the photographs with the models’ knowledge and permission and that they have given you valid model releases. That leaves the question of whether the photos are obscene. If they are, you could be charged with violating state and/or local obscenity laws. What is obscene? The U.S. Supreme Court has struggled with this question. Justice Potter Stewart characterized it as “trying to define what may be indefinable.” The Court’s guidelines, if you can really call them that, are hardly more than the instinctive reactions of the people in the street: “(a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’ would find that work, taken as a whole, appears to the prurient interest… (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically
